Resin printer primer. Help me out please

In My Humble Opinion
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Continuing the discussion from Resin 3D printers: How bad are the fumes?:

Small well rated units seem to now be in the $190 to $260 range. These are perfect for printing miniatures, small parts and small toys. The level of detail is far greater than the PLA/Filament types.

What I have found so far, and is it correct

  • It appears assembly is very simple.
  • Slicing the drawing appears to be basically the same
  • Resin is hazardous and a potential mess
  • Wear gloves and a mask (How serious of a mask?)
  • Most resins prints need to be cleaned by swirl in Isopropyl Alcohol, 91% or higher.
  • Remove supports or at least most supports before curing.
  • Resin printer than need to be cured in UV
  • Curing works better with warmth I think I’m seeing, so putting it in the sun to cure in the winter might not be ideal.

What don’t I know here?
What are good brands?
What should I look for?
Are there good inexpensive 3D scanners yet?

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@Dr.Strangelove @markn_1 any advice or comments for a potential buyer?

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They’re not perfect, but phones aren’t bad at this and getting better all the time. I gather new iPhones even have a kind of lidar.

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I have an Elegoo Mars. Works well; no real complaints there. Decent quality construction, and has held up over several dozen prints.

Basically everything you said is correct, though I’d say a mask is overkill if it’s in a well-ventilated area. A basic (non-ventilator) mask isn’t going to do much for the fumes, anyway.

They are a definite pain in the ass overall, with the multiple, messy steps and chemicals involved. The end products look very good, but it’s a lot of work. I would only get one if you have a place outside the house to use it–garage, shed, etc. Some people say that you shouldn’t even use filament printers indoors; I think that’s silly and have never had a problem with those. But for resin printers, it’s no exaggeration to say that you definitely don’t want it in a living area.

I keep a set of alcohol baths going so as to waste less of the alcohol. The first bath gets most of the uncured resin off, the second gets more, and the final one gets the rest (it stays fairly clean because it’s just getting the last bits). When they get too cloudy, I discard the first bath, rotate the others, and pour a fresh final rinse.

Supports are a pain, though this is mostly because the kind of high-detail stuff one wants to print have a lot of overhangs. The Chitubox software that comes with the Elegoos is pretty bad at automatic support placement and I have to tweak it by hand.

It never gets very cold here so I can’t speak to the temperature dependence of the curing process. I got a solar-powered jewelry turner and a UV lamp, and put both in a box. Cost about $15 IIRC.

I will say that I use my filament printer far, far more often. Yeah, the resolution sucks but it’s just so much easier to use. However, most of my stuff is mechanical/structural in nature and I mostly don’t need the super fine detail of the resin printer. As you say, it’s good for miniatures and such.

I don’t know anything about 3D scanners. I used to have access to a basic laser scanner but it’s been years since I looked into it at all.

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Thank you so much.

I might need to hold off until a less fumy option is available. Or rearrange the basement a little to exhaust directly out a window.

The idea of it being next to my desk in my little office sounds like a bad idea.

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Elegoo claims to have a model with an air purifier now. But I don’t know how well that works.

The printing is only part of the problem–the cleaning/curing steps are smellier, in my experience, because you have large containers of alcohol and the resin itself. Maybe you could do that part outside, though. Also, there are apparently water-washable resins now, but I haven’t used them.

I’d think that the basement, with a bit of ventilation, would be fine. You mainly just don’t want to be breathing the fumes for hours on end. As long as it can air out a bit over time, it should be fine. I definitely wouldn’t want it next to me on my desk, though.

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About a decade ago, someone figured out how to make a 3D scanner from a webcam, a laser pointer, and a cylindrical lens. The software (and pattern to print on the backdrop) used to be free, briefly, but then he started selling it, and I haven’t seen a cheap, user-friendly implementation of the idea since.

Alternately, you can do photogrammatry, where you take pictures of an object with an ordinary camera from a bunch of different angles, but the software for that tends to be expensive and a bit buggy.

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Basement, under a window with a window fan running exhaust on high.
Build a stable table to support the printer and cleaning station.

Of course this is the opposite end of the house from my office, but the house is fairly small. Puts the printer near the deep sink and the somewhat close to the craft bench and my workshop.

Maybe this could work.
I’m reading good reviews on the Elegoo Mars 2 I’m pretty sure. Tom’s Hardware rates it #1.

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Sounds like a good plan. The printer isn’t putting out enormous quantities of fumes; it’s just that they tend to build up unless there’s some airflow. A nearby window fan should be fine.

The Mars 2 Pro looks pretty solid. The adjustment/leveling process is a little tedious, but easy. I gather from the article that the competitors are worse here. My filament printer was more annoying until I installed a Z sensor.

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There is a filament printer in the house, 3 years old with a major nozzle issue and leveling was always a complete pain. But if I wanted to print larger less precise stuff I would consider rehabbing it. If I wait another year though, I’ll probably just replace it if I needed one.

What did you use for the alcohol baths? I was considering 2 quart size containers for the baths. Easy to handle and big enough for anything I plan to print.

I love the idea of the jewelry turner and UV lamp. I’ll probably go that route. I never even thought about jewelry turners. What a great shortcut.

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I’ve made a little work area under a window and near the deep sink. I have power available and added a bright LED shop light over the table. So that part is all set.

I just did a deep dive in the washable resins and they sound pretty good, a lot less fumy, minimal need for alcohol and generally safer. The are apparently a bit more brittle. I’ll have to watch that.

Note: The used cleaning water needs to be exposed to sunlight (or UV light) so the resin consolidates and can be filters out. Then the water is safe to dump.

Excellent article on it here for anyone else reading along.

I’m deciding between two printers now. Both a little more than I though I would spend.
ANYCUBIC Photon Mono 4K 3D Printer, 6.23’’ Monochrome Screen Upgraded LCD SLA UV Resin 3D Printers with Fast & Precise Printing and Large Printing Size 5.20’‘X3.14’‘X6.50’’ $288.99

–or–

ELEGOO Resin 3D Printer Mars 2 Pro Mono MSLA 3D Printer UV Photocuring LCD Resin 3D Printer with 6.08 inch 2K Monochrome LCD, Printing Size 129x80x160mm/5.1x3.1x6.3inch. $254.99

For $34 extra I’m leaning towards the slightly larger 4k printer over the 2k printer. They both come highly rated and well reviewed.

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Yeah, though 4k is going to be a somewhat marginal improvement, for $34 I’d spring for that too.

Here’s an example of the print quality under good conditions:

Sorry for the offensive gesture; it isn’t directed at you :slight_smile: (I printed it out just as a test; our Dungeon Master saw it and asked for it. He then came up with a scenario in our game that required a jerk of a dwarf :slight_smile: ).

Anyway, this guy is only about 1.5" tall. His finger is less than a millimeter across and yet came out with very decent detail. You can see some ridges at this distance, but you’d have a hard time seeing them with bare eyes.

My baths are smaller than that; maybe half a quart each. I’d have to step that up if I printed out larger items, but so far everything I’ve printed is under a few cubic inches.

I use disposable plastic containers that I can close and give a good shake. For the first-stage rinse, I just brush off the excess with a small paintbrush, while for the later stages I like to get a good swirl going and so I put the lids on.

As it happens, I’ve also used an ultrasonic cleaner for washing, but that’s massive overkill most of the time. It might be worthwhile for something with lots of intricate detail, like a model of the Eiffel Tower or something. For other stuff, there’s no need.

Thanks for the link about the water-washable resin. I’ll have to give that a try sometime; see if it makes the process a bit less painful.

Ahh, one more tip. Sometimes it’s hard to remove the print from the platform. The Elegoo comes with a terrible scraper. I use plastic razor blades instead:

They’re sharp enough to really get under the edge of the model and pry it up, but being plastic they won’t damage the surface.

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On that note I’ve made the order including the plastic razor blades.

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Do you folks mind a couple of questions?

  • Do you do your own designs?
  • If not, where do you get them?
  • What scale do you do most of your work in?
  • Is it cost/time effective?
  • How many figures do you figure you would make in a year?

I have a ton of figures I’ve bought and painted over the years. Hundreds of the old 28mm Warhammer stuff, but now I mostly do 1/35 or 1/24 scale. I probably buy 40 or 50 figures a year, priced somewhere between $5 to $25 each. Yes, I have a bunch of untouched figures laying around. If I could save myself some cash and have some fun while doing it, I would consider buying one of these. The printer prices shown in this thread are much lower than the last time I looked .

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I’m not in the miniatures scene at all (Warhammer, etc.). My 3D printing kick started with mechanical and structural designs, for which I use Fusion 360 (free for personal use, and an amazing piece of software) to design (it also integrates well with a laser cutter).

For almost all of that I continue to use my filament printer, but I thought I’d dip my toes in the resin scene for fun. Not too unexpected, but the filament printer is still superior for the mechanical stuff.

That said, I do (or did, until our long campaign ended) play D&D and thought it would be fun to print some miniatures of our characters and some enemies. I’m not particularly artistic and so these are all downloads, mostly from Thingiverse, though occasionally also from forums and the like. Scale is… loose. I scaled most of the prints to fit in a 1" base, and were roughly human-sized, so if you assume a typical human would stand in a 2-foot circle, then I guess they were about 1:24. There would be plenty of detail even at 1:36 though.

For me, learning a new technology is part of the fun, so while the printer hasn’t exactly paid for itself in terms of saving some other costs, I’ve certainly got a few hundred bucks of value out of it. The filament printer has been better in that regard. I’ve been able to design and build things that I could not otherwise have, or that would cost hundreds of dollars to have made.

A print takes a few hours, so I could make hundreds a year if I wanted. Thousands, really, if you packed more than one mini in each run (the print time is dependent only on the height of the model, not the complexity). If I wanted an army of largely identical soldiers, it would definitely pay for itself quickly if they were $5+ each.

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So how much does the raw material cost for one of these? And how dimensionally precise are they? I’m thinking of getting a printer myself, and was assuming it’d be a filament one, but if the resin ones are that cheap, then maybe…

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It’s about $25/kg for the basic stuff. More if you want some extra features (like $40/kg for the water soluable stuff). Given that your prints will have a lot of hollow portions, it’s likely that your prints will be <$1 each.

The density is a little more than water, ~1.2 g/cm^3, so you can also think of it as costing about 3 cents/cc.

Dimensional precision depends on the design. Under good conditions, it should be quite high. However, under some conditions I’ve seen a stretching effect in Z. Essentially this happens because the resin to be cured is pressed against a plastic sheet at the base of the resin vat, and when it comes time to make the next layer, the model is pulled up to separate it. If it’s too sticky at that point, it can stretch the model. I think this largely happens when there is a narrow point in the model further up, but it is trying to unpeel a large surface from the film. A model with more constant area wouldn’t have that problem. And maybe some fine-tuning of the exposure parameters would help as well.

What do you plan on printing?

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There are hundreds of free .stl D&D mini prints available out there. Especially on Thingiverse as mentioned. But I plan to start making some myself. I already repaint existing figs and the Deep Cuts. We modded dozens of cheap superhero figs.

I’ve built castle pieces out of wood and foam. My daughter has sculpted figures from a clay that bakes at about 300 degrees. We printed a few dozen figs on my son’s filament printer but the quality tended to be low.

But as mentioned above, the filament printer was great for printing fairly basic parts.

My shower doors at the old house had gliding guides no one carried. I was able to design and print replacements. A few other things like that.

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Here’s a little thing I designed in Fusion 360 and printed. Took maybe 30 min to design. Worked perfectly the first time.

Can you guess what it is (you can’t)? It clips onto my keyboard to protect 3 buttons at the top. The buttons switch the device the keyboard is connected to. The holes are large enough for me to poke my finger into, but–critically–smaller than a kitten’s paw. As a result, my kitten cannot change the device selection as he walks across my keyboard, changing it to the primary, and taking my computer out of sleep mode while I am trying to sleep.

How’s that for a specialized part?

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That is seriously awesome and what so many of us love about the idea of 3D printers.