thaipham101

Hi guys, Some occasional updates. 1. My fiance found another Elegoo Saturn 3 Ultra for me so now my printer set up is 7 printers. However, the Mars 5 is waiting for some structural parts and the Saturn 2's LCD just reached its end of life the other day. It served me well for the past 3 years through so much abuse. So now I'm down to 5 printers, but fast and big ones. I'm still deciding if it's worth it to get the Saturn 2 back up and running again since the original screen for it is more than $100, around $130-150, which is on the same range where I can buy a barely used Saturn 3 Ultra. Or, I can get the Chitubox 14k upgrade set but will it be worth it being at $160 something. Sure I'll get 14k quality but I don't need that much and I'll still be stuck with the S2's slow speed. Anyway, the other 5 work fast enough for me so not much worry. 2. The Elegoo Mercury X wash and cure can't keep up with the print load from all the printers, resulting in me having to spend so much time everyday washing prints, so I bought an ultrasonic cleaner. It works wonder, I can cut my wash time in more than half, more like down to 1/4 of what I usually spend, which is great. And no vortex cleaning = less broken parts, and cleaner prints. 3. Orders have been going out steadily, a few of them a day and I'll try to increase the number of orders shipped in the coming days once more parts flow in. Beside the very first 2 orders, none are reported to have parts broken in transit so far, which means my protective cages work as intended. This is a sample of the 1/32 kit waiting for some final parts. 4. I just want to remind you guys that it's a one-man operation, I do everything from printing, washing, curing, printer maintenance, sorting parts, packing, designing, ordering supply, etc. so it will take time. Rest assured I'm aiming to have all back orders out the door within the month. Sometimes my fiancé helps me in Saturday but since she has only "our" day to really rest I avoid having her do so too much. So please bear with me. 5. More stuffs are coming. I've placed a decal order and they should be done by the end of next week and I'll have the decals on hand before the end of the month. Beside more decals for the 3 original AD-5 schemes, I've added 16 sets for the last VNAF AD-5 shot down in the war, flown by Maj. Truong Phung. What his AD-5 looked like was all speculation though and I drew my decals on the best guest I can gather around. In addition to that, there will also be 11 sets each in 1/32 and 1/48 for the AD-5N, AD-5Q, and AD-5W. I'll print final test parts next week and once the decals are confirmed to be on the way, I'll put the AD-5N, AD-5Q, and AD-5W on my website and start taking orders for those. This time y'all don't have to wait for too long to get those kits. Once I get enogh sales I'll order more decals in addition to adding more paint schemes too all kits. I plan to buy decals for the AD-5U and AD-5S next time too, as well as the white and international orange Navy scheme for the AD-5. 6. Next Saturday I'll visit Lionheart Hobby in Kyle, Texas to deliver their first wholesale order in addition to taking my fiancé out for a roadtrip, I haven't taken her out for somewhere out of Houston for a while, so there'll be some down time. After that, I'll fly to California for our friend's brother's wedding and her daughter's first bday, I plan to stay in OC, California for a couple days then spend a few more days in LA to meet my customers and also try to see the YO-3A there, so I'll probably be out for almost a week. After that I'll head home and start printing kits to bring to National. That's it for today. Have a fun weekend y'all.

Some updates for the holiday guys 2 degrees. 2 degrees is the difference between a consistently successful print and a consistently failed one. One of the last modifications I made to the kit is to have the spine antenna housing in one part with the rear fuselage rather than having it separately, which means I have to reslice and support the new fuselage. It made me scratch my head because I can't get one single successful print. The only 2 good fuselages came out of the S4U before it died (still no ETA on when it's fixed unfortunately). I have to study one of the old fuselages and found out that my new fuselage is angled at 2 degrees higher than the previous ones. Once I dialed it back by 2 degrees things start to go well again. The failed print and the corrected one Also, all 4 of my running printers, the S2, S3U, Jupiter SE, and Mighty 8K are now all dialed in and print with 0% fail, which means there are more prints than the Elegoo Mercury X wash and cure machines can keep up with. So over last week I bought a broken microwave oven and stripped its parts out and converted it into one big ass curing machine. Right now I'm also working on making an alcohol recycling system to reuse the alcohol rather than throwing it away, to cut down on waste and cost. Next I'll look into another bigger washing solution. Now I have a ton of parts to sort and box, my fiance wants to help me during the Memorial holiday but we're having some heavy rain down here in South Houston it's not worth risking it to bring all of the boxes and parts out to my car under the rain. My protective cages seem to work as intended but on the ones with big opening, delicate areas of parts are still getting damaged, like this one sent to me by one of the customers. So from now on I'll wrap the openings up and use cardboard to protect the fuselages better.

Last update for the week, see y'all Monday I was packing the fuselages into the boxes when my fiance propose an idea that she wanted to have her hands in this so I'm packing everything into a box and tmr I'll bring it and the kit boxes to her house and we'll do it together, our kind of date I guess. The ones wrapped in foam are wings to prevent damage on their delicate details Also she proposed printing some cute AD-5s as wedding gifts, so I'm printing a proof of concept sample to show her tmr

another printer is added, this time I've decided to move away from Elegoo and toward more consistent brands like Phrozen and Uniformation so now at least I have 4 printers running

Right now I'm torn between that GK3U and the Phrozen Mega 8K S. I never care about all the extra bullshits like resin pump, heater, autoleveling, etc. or even the fancy doors since I throw them all away anyway and the Mega 8K S seem to be the good fit. The only thing is it's too simple to the point that it doesn't even have wifi but that isn't that big of a deal breaker. That said, it's not easy to find a GK3U that cheap so I'm waiting to see how things go and if I get 9-10 more orders I'd probably get it and leave the Phrozen for later. The GK3U begin with a fiasco called rail gate since they advertised it as having dual linear rails but people get shipped ones without, but they have already fixed it so I think it should be good

Good news for the week Despite the S4U being such a shitty printer, the rest are pumping prints out like there's no tomorrow with less than 1% fail, mostly concerning the 5" HVAR, some of them warped for some reason while others are just fine. Pictured is half of what I've printed from the previous week. Another good news is that I'm close to closing some deals with a US distributor and got contacted by and am working on a deal with a European distributor, and orders are flowing in so probably I'll invest in some more reliable printers like Uniformation and Phrozen.

yeah right now I'm on the fence between the M7 Max and the GK3 Ultra, still don't know which one yet but there's a GK3 Ultra local to me, brand new, for even cheaper than a new M7 Max so I'll probably nab it and if I can, a M7 Max, to compare the 2

Some sad updates. Looks like my S4U motherboard is toasted, so Elegoo is sending me a replacement mobo and z motor, which will put the S4U out of commission for the next 10-20 days if I'm lucky, more if I'm not. Whatever, the S3U seem to be doing just as good, it's a little between the S2 and S4U. I'm also working toward buying at least 2 more printers to offset the absence of the S4U so things are still going at the moment.

I've seen pretty good reviews of the M7 series comparing to the S4. Can it run without the heater and resin pump plugged in? I'm thinking about trying one, not sure which version yet.

And I was right to get the S3U. The dog 💩 S4U wrecks itself again, a whole 2 days after I replaced the screen. This time its Z motor malfunctions and stopped moving mid-print. I'm done for the night. Whatever tbh I'll work with what works

anything to make her happy I've just got a 4th printer and in the talk to sell some old camera equipments and steelbooks blurays, once that's done I might buy another one or two to speed up production

a bit of good news the Saturn 4 Ultra's screen seem to be working well so far, still have to wait and see how it goes before I can trust that model and order more or switch to another. In the mean time, I've just got a Saturn 3 Ultra since it's a proven platform, doing calibration prints right now and fingers crossed it works out, within an hour or so I'll know and can start production prints.

No no don't worry. It only applies to new orders. All of you who already placed order with me are safe. I can't be a jackass and do that to y'all. My fiance loves crawfish more than she loves me lol, when it's crawfish season I have to get her some every Saturday

Of course how can I miss the head. From people who have hold it my Skyraider is surpirisingly light. The whole box itself is barely 2.5lbs

some updates for the weekend 1. Kinda bad news. My kits are dirt cheap because it's more like a passion project and I do other jobs on the side to supplement my income and pay taxes. However, since now I have dropped everything and devote all my time into this business and there are investments I must make to push this business ahead (I'll announce once it's completed, hopefully between July and August) and machines and materials to buy, I'll sadly have to up the price from $150 to $175 to 1/32 kits and $100 to $120 for 1/48 kits to make it worth my effort. Also I'm in talk with some big hobby stores/distributor and of course for wholesale I have to have discount and at the current price, after discount I pretty much work for less than a burger flipper at McD for longer hours. Changes will be applied on the store next week. I still have discount on direct deal as always. 2. The Saturn 4 Ultra's screen has arrived and been installed and it's running now. Not the one that Elegoo promised to sell me at a discounted price but one I bought on my own from Amazon. Fingers crossed it lasts longer. I'm also eyeing the Uniformation GK3 Ultra as the 4th printer but I'll have to see how things go. 3. I and my fiance have a pact that Saturday is our day, so as usual I cooked her some crawfish yesterday and to my surprise she asked me to help build the AD-5 kit that I gave her. Most of the kits I designed to be as much as snap-fit as possible so there's no sanding neccessary, so we didn't have to don our masks to build it. The parts that need sanding I've brought home to sand, as well as the vacu-form canopies since she doesn't have any experience in cutting vacu-form stuffs. Well, I don't either but I have cut my stuffs so I know a little more than her. A lot of people who know me wonder why I want to marry her despite being surrounded by a lot of girls who are prettier, richer, or better homemaker. Well, this is why. Anyway, story is over, now I'm back to adjusting some minor details on the APS-19 and APS-30 radar pods, hopefully I can have the AD-5N/Q/W samples built and reveled next week.