Are resin printers the pain in the ass they appear to be?

Rilot

Rilot

Rilot

Don
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
23,199
Location
Wargrave, UK
I've got 3 FDM machines (1 x 350mm Core-XY, 2 x 250mm cartesian) but I keep looking at resin printers. The whole post processing lark looks to be a royal pain in the ass, as does dealing with left over resin.

I'm not sure what I would use it for to be honest as I'm not really interested in miniatures or anything like that. I just seem to have this feeling that I should be exploring this area.

So, sell me on resin printers? Do they have to be a pain in the ass? How are they for making structural parts like gears, extruder housings etc.?

Really hoping SLS comes down in price over the next few years as it looks to be the best balance between SLA/DLP and FDM.
 
They do require a lot of clean up compared to FDM particularly if you have failures it gets messy, resin is pretty brittle even with tougher ABS like resin so mostly only used for miniatures and busts not something that is subject to load or mechanical stress.

I have a couple of them but if not interested in miniatures then no real point in having one to be fair.
 
Resin isn't that much of a PITA really. You can use water washable resins to get around using IPA to clean off the extra uncured resin. The Anycubic Wash and Cure machines are really good, takes a lot of the mess out of things although with practice there is no mess. Silicone slapmats are useful for working on, paper towels too. I run a fair few resin machines from 5.5" screens up to 15.6" screens, 2K, 4K, RGB and mono and I don't find the post processing to be a hassle.
 
Seconded on the photon wash and cure. Technically you don't need a wash and cure to clean up your prints but honestly I'd say they're a necessity.

I have the phrozen sonic mini 4k and when it works it gets results in resolution that FDM just can't compare to and it's fantastic for sculptural stuff... but it's more of an alchemy than FDM when it comes to troubleshooting problems, you need gloves for everything and even just resetting after a fail is so much more hassle.

If you go for it my main piece of advice is to be methodical and clean with your environment and set up. Buy lots of blue shop towel.
 
Rilot said:
I've got 3 FDM machines (1 x 350mm Core-XY, 2 x 250mm cartesian) but I keep looking at resin printers. The whole post processing lark looks to be a royal pain in the ass, as does dealing with left over resin.

I'm not sure what I would use it for to be honest as I'm not really interested in miniatures or anything like that. I just seem to have this feeling that I should be exploring this area.

So, sell me on resin printers? Do they have to be a pain in the ass? How are they for making structural parts like gears, extruder housings etc.?

Really hoping SLS comes down in price over the next few years as it looks to be the best balance between SLA/DLP and FDM.
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Resin printers are fantastic for things like hotend fan housings, they are not great for gears or at least not fast moving meshes. None of the affordable resins I've seen or used are suitable for RC car gearboxes or similar. They all erode and grind away. However you can of course make moulds from printed parts and then cast gears, using say old supports from FDM melted down. SLS is still crazy expensive, Sinterit are about the most affordable and with the powder reclamation you're still well over 10K for a very small useable build area. The actual build area is much smaller than the build area with some materials like PA12 as it uses a lot of that build area as thermal insulation rather than actual build area. And my view is that powder is more complex to clean up, reclaim (can't reuse it without adding to virgin powder) than resin is. I have some SLS parts on my desk from Sinterit (Lisa Pro) which are pretty good. I can recommend you a couple of good SLS companies in the UK where you just upload your part and they print it for you by SLS, not cheap though.

I do a fair bit of functional and structural printing for customers of relatively small and non load bearing parts but many are moving over to SLS suppliers, resin is pretty much prototyping and dentistry with much of it being miniature makers. The slew of monochrome screens and the "vroom" print settings make prints very fast now but in my experience faster print settings leave inadequate time for the screen to cool and screens die from overheating. This could be solved with bigger louder fans (people already complain about noise with fans) or the use of a quartz glass (expensive) thermal barrier and better airflow between that and the LED array. Anything is possible.
 
Toasty said:
They do require a lot of clean up compared to FDM particularly if you have failures it gets messy, resin is pretty brittle even with tougher ABS like resin so mostly only used for miniatures and busts not something that is subject to load or mechanical stress.
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I use Siraya tech Blu mixed with 10% Tenacious for any mechanical parts I print. Stronger than my PETG FDM prints.

I have an Elegoo Saturn.
 
amigafan2003 said:
I use Siraya tech Blu mixed with 10% Tenacious for any mechanical parts I print. Stronger than my PETG FDM prints.

I have an Elegoo Saturn.
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Siraya Blu and Blu V2 are great resins but rub two parts together and they start to deteriorate, no good for gears.
 
I recently picked up a creality LD002-H and I’m pretty happy with it. Adding a wash and cure machine definitely reduces some of the hassle and I don’t find the smell of the resins I’ve used so far particularly bad (sirayatech blu and elegoo abs like). IPA stinks to high heaven of course, but you can get alternatives like formfutura’s wash stuff or use water washable resin - you still need to be careful and not wash the waste water down the drain though.

It is definitely a lot more hassle than FDM overall, resin choice is much more limited than filament, and if I could only have one machine it would be FDM for sure. In return however you get the ability to make some truly stunning parts... there are also some advantages such as no layer weakness, it can be very fast, especially when printing multiple parts as it doesn’t care how much of the build platform is covered, it takes the same amount of time to expose the layer regardless.

There is no way it will replace my FDM machine and will see way less use, but I’m glad I got one. Obviously if you like printing miniatures there is no comparison, but I’m more of a mechanical parts guy and even then I can see I’ll be using it for some particular parts where it is more suitable.
 
Zeeflyboy said:
I recently picked up a creality LD002-H and I’m pretty happy with it. Adding a wash and cure machine definitely reduces some of the hassle and I don’t find the smell of the resins I’ve used so far particularly bad (sirayatech blu and elegoo abs like). IPA stinks to high heaven of course, but you can get alternatives like formfutura’s wash stuff or use water washable resin - you still need to be careful and not wash the waste water down the drain though.
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It's just rebranded TPM - you can buy 25 litres from british chemical products for 160gbp. That's what I do and sell the excess I don't use of on ebay for 18gbp for 1l bottle :) Pays for itself. Works better than IPA and lasts longer.
 
Well, I bought a Mars 2 a while back. It's working well but is a pain in the ass. Already on my 2nd screen due to getting resin on the original from a pinhole in the FEP caused by a failed print.
I can't see me using it much TBH. It was a lot of fun to make miniatures for my son but after that I've not really used it. It's not much use for functional stuff as the output is too brittle.
 
Rilot said:
It's not much use for functional stuff as the output is too brittle.
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Depends largely on the resin... the general "ABS-like" type resins are much less brittle than standard resins and reasonably strong, Siraya-tech Blu is probably the toughest for when you need something that can stand up to some more serious abuse.

 
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I'm using the ABS-like resins at the moment. I still find it a little too brittle for my liking.
I tend to print functional stuff in ABS on my FDM printers.
 
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