points by vl 1 day ago | 0 comments
This page really needs to explain what is “resin printer” and why would I need it. I have no idea how is it different from my regular 3D printer.
[–] dofm 1 day ago
[–] nojs 1 day ago
Thanks for posting that, very helpful
[–] KaiserPro 1 day ago
Just to add to this post, the resin isn't great to handle, but crucially for the end user, you need to post process the part quite a bit before its "usable"
The part needs to be washed, and then stuck in a UV bath to do a final curing.
Having said that, you get higher precision parts and can print in optically transparent materials.
[–] dofm 14 hours ago
Optically transparent materials is a very good point, and it hints at something else that I should have included in my roundup, which is that resin prints are much, much closer to isotropic than FDM prints. There are layer lines in resin prints but they are hard to see, and the nature of layer bonding at exposure means there are few layer-to-layer weaknesses.
[–] Jtsummers 1 day ago
It prints by curing a resin instead of heating and forming plastic. They've been around in industry for decades.
[–] unintelligibled 1 day ago
And they started being available to consumers some ten years ago or something, I recall them blowing up in popularity like crazy a couple of years later. For someone to have a 3D printer and not know what resin printers are seems very unusual.
Resin printers, basically, are stereolithographic. They:
- dip the build plate (upside down) into a thin tray of resin
- push it all the way onto onto a screen at the bottom of the tray
- blast that screen with UV through a translucent LCD display that contains a mask image of the current "slice" of the whole plate, enough that the thin layer of resin partly cures
- lift the plate out of the resin so it peels off the screen and the resin replenishes below it
- repeat, with the next slice.
- then the whole model is taken out by hand, washed off, blasted with UV light to completely cure it, and the (more or less inevitable) supports snipped off.
So instead of printing line by line, the entire plate prints layer by layer — a small print takes (approximately) the same time as a full plate.
There are several big differences, notably that it is single-colour, much higher resolution, the various peel/adhesion forces are managed differently, larger parts need to be hollow with a vent so uncured resin drains out, most resin prints are quite brittle, and the whole process is traditionally really rather cytotoxic.
There are eco resins, tough resins, and printers that do a better job of not being chemically evil; this is one.
I've stayed away from it, because it's not the kind of printing I need (for all except one part that I might end up subcontracting) and because it is chemically nastier than b/w darkroom printing, which until now has been about my limit of risk.
The above is a bit of an oversimplification but it covers the main differences I think (happy to have corrections/additional comments)
https://formlabs.com/uk/blog/ultimate-guide-to-stereolithogr...