I’ve had my new eufyMake E1 UV printer for less than a week, so I am absolutely not going to pretend that I know what I’m doing yet.
However, I’m already learning quite a lot. Today’s lesson was: if your black cat starts turning green, something may be wrong.
The case of the un-black cat
I wanted to try a dimensional print of a black cat today. (It is merely a coincidence that Halloween is coming up at the end of this month. My cat Minky is a black cat, so every day is Halloween for me.)
I tried printing the same black cat design in two different ways. The first version was a flat print, on a laser-cut blank bauble shape. It came out exactly as I expected: black fur, pink inside the ears, greeny-yellow eyes and white highlights to give the fur a bit of shine. Nice.
Then I tried printing the same design with some dimensionality. But that was when things got weird. There was still a little bit of pink inside the ears… but a lot of it had turned green. And the white highlights in the black fur were also looking green.
Instead of a cute black cat, I had accidentally created some kind of otherworldly green cat instead. Spooooky.
It’s really hard to show problems with colours when everybody’s screen displays things differently, but here are the two images side by side, which may help to show the difference.
I don’t yet know why the dimensional print made the problem much more obvious than the flat one. But it was enough to make me wonder whether the problem was with the printer rather than the artwork.
Time for a test print
Out of interest, I ran the printer’s proper print-test sequence. I wasn’t expecting to see anything wrong on the test print, because I’ve had the machine for less than a week and have only printed about 10 images so far. But this is what happened:
Cyan, yellow, black and white all seem fine. Something is obviously wrong with the magenta, though. Nearly half of the magenta test dots haven’t printed out properly.
I guess that explains the strange colour shift. If the printer wasn’t laying down enough magenta, then areas that should have contained a balanced mixture of colours were naturally going to look much greener than they should.
At least I now had something concrete to troubleshoot.
Cleaning all the things
I then followed the maintenance instructions on the eufyMake website and worked my way through several of the printer’s cleaning options. I did:
- a manual clean
- two flash cleans
- a medium clean
Then I ran another test print.
Woof! Almost all of the magenta test dots were now appearing.
So it looks like it might have been a temporary ink-flow or nozzle issue that the cleaning process somehow improved? That was extremely reassuring, because it suggested that the problem was not some mysterious flaw in my image file or an expensive hardware disaster.
One more cat
What I obviously wanted to know by that time was whether the dimensional print would now come out properly. (Plus, you can never have too many cats.) So I printed the dimensional black cat again, this time onto a slice of wood.
Thankfully, the colours came out correctly. The ears were pink again, and the fur highlights were white again.
The cat was black rather than eldritch green.
Result.
What have I actually learned?
Not enough to write a definitive UV printer troubleshooting guide, that’s for sure. I’ve barely had the machine a week.
But I have learned a few useful things already.
First, if the colours in a print suddenly look wrong, it’s worth running a proper printer test rather than assuming the artwork is the problem.
Second, the cleaning routines can make a very obvious difference. And third, I want to keep using the printer regularly enough that the inks are moving through the system rather than sitting around doing nothing.
Conveniently, I have now started coming up with mini projects that will help me do exactly that.
I’m currently experimenting with things like little Halloween earrings: pumpkins, bats, ghosts, black cats and other tiny printed designs that use a good mixture of colours. If I can turn “I should probably run the printer today” into “I’ll make another pair of earrings”, that seems useful as well as being good for the ink circulation.
So today’s problem did at least produce something productive.
I fixed the cat. I learned a bit more about the machine. And I found an excuse to make tiny spooky jewellery for the rest of October.