I am considering buying a 3d resin printer to enable me to make my own figures and small hi-res detail parts that aren’t possible with my filament printer.
Does anybody here have any experience with this, and could advise on the resolution required (both XY and layer height) and whether the new(ish) water-washable resins are good enough for this job
I have been looking at a couple of candidate 8k/12k printers (Anycubic and Elegoo) but not made up my mind which way to go yet.
The whole resin management thing seems potentially more space-consuming and messy than just standard filament printing, so I’m unsure how to go with this.
Thanks in advance for any help,
Bob
If you want good detail, I would look for a min resolution of 0.1mm (~.004"). 0.05mm would be even better.
Tom
Thanks, Tom. Some of the ones I have looked at go down to 18 microns XY (0.018mm) so that sounds very promising! More research….
Wow, Bob! 0.018mm (0.0007") would be VERY acceptable. Out of curiosity, what is the Z-axis tolerance for the same printers?
Tom
Stay away from water washable
I tried the elegoo stuff and the detail was blah at best, it was super fragile, and ive had prints ive done-EXPLODE- weeks after doing them.
The explosion is from uncured resin inside said print- it starts to harden and builds pressure. The pressure goes somewhere and 
…
Im pretty happy with Sunlu ABS like resin
These were all done with that resin
@Jimmy_Braum, ABS is pretty good to use, I’ve used it once to print an N-Scale Budd Passenger car and Chassis with the bogies too and I just ordered the counterweights and wheels after, I did that about 5 years ago and its staying strong, personally ABS is the way to go just start off with white and paint it later on for texture/detail
Tom -
In the Z-axis the numbers are confusing me. Typically they quote “layer height” as being from, for example, 0.05-0.15mm. Or sometimes 0.01-0.2mm. But how layer height is affected by z positioning tolerance I’m unclear.
Bob
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Thanks for all the input. Never heard of exploding prints before! No decisions will be made for a while yet, and the world will have moved on again by then, but this is all good pre-prep!
Bob
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