Anyone have experience with them, consumer level or otherwise?
I've been looking at getting a second printer, and was just going to go FDM again, but I've been seeing a lot of resin printers for under $500.
Other than what I consider to be tiny build surfaces, I don't know much at all about them. Supposedly detail is ridiculous and post processing almost unnecessary, but that's according to some 3d print blogs, not necessarily anyone I would trust.
Buddy at USF's art dept has control over a couple of the Formlabs Form 2. I've played with him and helped him print stuff. Yes, the detail is incredible, and I'd generally agree with the post processing in regards to sanding and cleaning. Detail was good enough that I had to go back to the computer and refine how my models were being processed as I got polygons on the curves and not a smooth curve (if that doesn't make sense I can go into more detail)
The resin is expensive, and supposedly it can expire, we went through it quick enough to not experience that though. Some types of the resin are very fragile as well, I've dropped prints from a height of 3-4 feet or more and had them shatter when they hit a concrete floor. I personally found it kind of annoying that you had to cure the prints after with UV light and wash them with alcohol before doing that, you can buy into the infrastructure and set it up to automatically do that for you but we didn't do that so it was a couple more steps
Maintenance was fairly easy as well, although he has had some recent issue that has downed it and I'm not sure if he has figured it out yet.
All that being said, as much as I liked them, I don't know that I'd have one for home just to have one. If I were casting jewelry or something similar and needed positives for molds it would be great
In reply to Mr_Asa :
It would be specifically for mold making, positives and or negatives. The issue I'm seeing is build size, I'd need to make my molds modular to fit in the space. Doing one and two piece molds on the FDM printer is fine so far, except for the whole hours of post processing and 12-18 hour print times.
The resin is a whole new animal. Do you just fill up a reservoir and it does the print and wastes the rest or will it let you use most of it before it needs a refill?
How well do the parts click together?
I hadn't thought about needing to clean up polygons. I've been using Tinkercad because I can't work blender with a mouse and was never good at 3d in auto cad, but it's very course with the shapes and edges.
On the Form 2 (not sure how others work) you fill a little reservoir on the printer, it has a valve that it keeps closed until it starts printing. As part of the warm up routine it partially fills the tray underneath and goes from there, refilling as necessary. You can reuse what has been dispensed, however you do need to filter what was in the tray. If you don't filter it and just decide to dump it, at most you'd lose a couple ounces (which is still painful at the price per quarter or half gallon that they are sold as.) The orange color cover on the Form system filters out the UV light wavelength that sets the resin, so you can just leave it in there if you want.
On any of the ones I have played with, parts will go together as well as they are designed. There's no shrinkage as they cool or set that I remember. The resolution on the prints is down to microns, better than I'd get machining parts with any of the mills or lathes available to me. If you can design them to click together then they will.
You do have to be cognizant of pockets where the resin might pool as that can affect the tabs and slots that you might be designing to hold stuff together, but beyond that you should have no problems sliding pieces together.
Dragging this back from the dead.
It's been almost 2 years, anybody have any more experience?
The Elegoo Saturn is now under $500 and has a print area the size of a regular FDM printer 9x9x9, or close enough, but most importantly, it seems to be in stock most places.
The follow up to this is that scanners are getting down to affordable and quality has been going up up up.
In reply to RevRico :
My good friend locally has 4-5 3D printers and 2-3 of them are resin. The printers themselves like the Elegoo are pretty awesome. The big deal is just that resin is a totally different animal. After you print you have to wash and cure. There are washing and curing stations now available. Some of the resin the UV lights don't cure it enough (you really need sun or something) and it stays slimy or tacky depending. There's a LOT of hazardous waste. It's a very different world from FDM.
I bought an Anycubic 3D printer on a whim. It definitely isnt as easy as it looks to print. Used a whole bottle of resin in just failures. Detail is really amazing when it does come out right. It takes some time to figure everything out. I kinda quit messing with it already. Also the Resin makes for very hard/brittle pieces
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