More Printing Goodness – and now the Crealty LD-002H

This write-up is about the . Should I simply point you back to my 2020 sprawling entry on the ? Hell no, because the H model has lots of upgrades, but if you want more generic info on the Crealty LD-002x range, I strongly recommend you look at the original review first. Also up there is info about Chitubox slicer, Lychee slicer, about replacing FEP sheets and much more.

So, below, I’m reporting on my newly acquired LD002H printer assuming you’ve already read or know a little about the subject. So, with the LD-002R model you would take an .STL file (your own or one of the many free files out there), convert it using the free Chitubox program to a file suitable for the LD-002R – put the file on a USB stick and plug that into the printer. The procedure is the same on the LD-002H but instead of LD-002R, selecting the template for the LD-002H in Chitubox.

I’ll avoid the marketing bull here – you can read all that in Crealty’s attrocious own, very boring YouTube videos – so what are the actual worthwhile improvements in the LD-002H compared to it’s predecessor the (IMHO excellent) LD-002R?

WELL, molding height is the same as the LD-002R but the other two dimensions go up from 119*65mm to 130*82mm for starters. Then there’s resolution increase, up from 1440*2560mm to 1620*2560mm (2K LCD HD screen). Curing time has dropped from 6-18s/layer to 1-4s/layer – WHEEEE.

Minimum layer height has, oddly increased a little, axis precision is up from 0.075mm to 0.051mm. For the environmentally conscious (or simply those who don’t like smelly printers – like me) they’ve added activated carbon filtering to keep the smell down even further. Not yet feeling the urge to open the window.

I also note that the UV light module has been upgraded to improve the printing success rate (I had no failures on the LD-002R so can’t really comment further).

Here’s a laugh – Crealty have at least 2 videos describing the printer – both are littered with dumb Facebook overlays and the sound in both cases is barely usable. I gave up watching – I will ultimately do my own video but meanwhile hopefully there’s enough useful info in here (including the Banggood link at the top) and my previous blog entry on the LD-002R..

For my first print on the new printer I tried a hollowed-out model “Baby Stitch” in clear light blue resin. 800+ layers – the printer says 2.5 hours – not sure why so long given the decreased exposure times – but there you are…. don’t know what’s wrong with his ears in the master file either – but it seems that is deliberate – our cats have missing chunks of ears, too. Definitely says 2 seconds per layer (12 seconds bottom layer) in the setup for Chitubox – they are defaults incidentally – I’d hate to give the impression that I know what I’m doing.

Just as the printing was starting I got the urge to check for Chitubox updates. I have version 1.7 and the update program announced that 1.8 was available. It went off to the site which stated that the latest version is 1.7 !! I do wish manufacturers would be a little more careful about announcements.

And here he is “in the flesh” – Baby Stitch courtesy of the LD-002H. As per the claim on my “Elegoo” pack of clear blue resin – sure enough, everything washed off with water (and a little soap) no problem.

I struggled to justify clear blue but it looks neat next to a glass or indeed backlit. I’ll grant you this sounds like a fail – but those ear joints are REALLY thin. Sadly, as we were cleaning up after dinner, just after I’d taken photos, he dropped onto the stone floor and one of his ears came off – next version (Mk 2) needed to be bigger and stronger (another 3hrs – which felt like 3 days while waiting for the end output).

On the left is a close-up of my first attempt, made from solid resin as I forgot to use the “hollow” command in Chitubox – nice but expensive in resin.

I ended up with plenty of resin in the tray and one slightly damaged Baby Stitch. So the next morning I increased the scale in Chitubox and…

– Baby Stitch MK 2 photo – bottom right… my new larger model is just fine – but when I took it out of the printer there seemed to be a large liquid bubble inside. I washed the model in water. The liquid could clearly be seen moving around inside.

All looked OK otherwise so I dried the model with kitchen roll.

I then bathed the model in the light of my for a few minutes and the liquid inside sure enough went solid so it WAS resin, sucked in as part of the curing process.

But this was supposed to be a hollowed out model. Now I understand, had I not been so quick to wash the model and external UV-harden it, I could have simply punctured a small hole in the bottom and retrieved the liquid uncured resin which got sucked inside. Next time I’ll know better. This never happened to me with the previous LD-002R printer but then again I never used water-cleanable resin with that one.

As an aside: Scargill’s tips to printer manufacturers: record how much resin is needed to do a job, auto measure amount of resin left, let user know if the job will finish and if so how much resin will be left in the tray.

The manual supplied with the LD-002H is perfectly good enough and got me started – but a tip for the manufacturer – both email contact addressed noted on the back page are DEAD. I finally got a contact email for Crealty (service.crealty@gmail.com) and asked them (a) why their two emails are dead and (b) what happened to the originally promoted WiFi? The response I got back (after telling them that I was supplied the printer to review) was not untypical of Chinese manufacturers responding to English queries…

“Since you are not purchasing the items from our site, we do not have your order information in our system and could not help you solve the issue, please try to contact the seller who you purchased it directly. We believe that they will help you.”

Dumb. Despite all that, I like the printer and expect to have lots of fun with it in the coming weeks. It’s predecesssor, the LD-002R was certainly GREAT fun as you’ll have noted if you checked out the review.