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I'm trying to figure out if I should take advantage of Anycubic's sale to pick up another couple of litres of resin. Is resin usually as expensive as theirs is full-price? Or is it the case that there's generic brand that does the job for half the price? Also, is Anycubic's plant based eco-resin really that different for the price point? Should I swap to that?

Generally speaking, what sorts of resins have other people which worked out and at what price point? And what ones didn't?

Anycubic is on the cheap side as far as I know. Have a few locals here that use it with great results, mainly gray and transparent green. They are on the stinkier side tho. But also check out Elegoo at the same price point, I hear the "ABS-Like" is significantly less brittle than anything else in that price bracket.

I have never used the Anycubic brand simply due to its reputation of being one of the more smelly brands.

The Elegoo is very low odor and the ABS like is just a few dollars more, but excellent. The key is not cooking (curing) your prints too long. I find about 2-3 minutes in my cure bin with the 60w UV light is more than enough. I have a timer, but the minimum is 10 minutes and if I forget and leave them in they are pretty brittle.

I also have found the Siraya Tech line excellent and a great price with the i-Found line a new discovery that is a great resin - and you get free gloves, funnel, mask and filter with your bottle - what a bargain! https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Y7W838S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 MDSW wrote:
I have never used the Anycubic brand simply due to its reputation of being one of the more smelly brands.

The Elegoo is very low odor and the ABS like is just a few dollars more, but excellent. The key is not cooking (curing) your prints too long. I find about 2-3 minutes in my cure bin with the 60w UV light is more than enough. I have a timer, but the minimum is 10 minutes and if I forget and leave them in they are pretty brittle.

I also have found the Siraya Tech line excellent and a great price with the i-Found line a new discovery that is a great resin - and you get free gloves, funnel, mask and filter with your bottle - what a bargain! https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Y7W838S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

You know you can get a timer that will cut the electrical feed after 10 minutes for you so that they don't overcook, right?

Sounds like tech heresy to me

chaos0xomega wrote:

 MDSW wrote:
I have never used the Anycubic brand simply due to its reputation of being one of the more smelly brands.

The Elegoo is very low odor and the ABS like is just a few dollars more, but excellent. The key is not cooking (curing) your prints too long. I find about 2-3 minutes in my cure bin with the 60w UV light is more than enough. I have a timer, but the minimum is 10 minutes and if I forget and leave them in they are pretty brittle.

I also have found the Siraya Tech line excellent and a great price with the i-Found line a new discovery that is a great resin - and you get free gloves, funnel, mask and filter with your bottle - what a bargain! https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07Y7W838S/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

You know you can get a timer that will cut the electrical feed after 10 minutes for you so that they don't overcook, right?

The timer minimum I have is 10 minutes, but 10 minutes is too long. They only need about 3 minutes so I have to set for 10, but remove/turn off at three. I suppose there must be a digital timer out there where I can set the time for whatever is needed...someday I will get one.

I have used a few brands.

Anycubic normal: Generally really solid. Not expensive, high quality... but the color matters! The green is the best, the white, black, and grey are good, but the magenta is pure garbage. I got some for free and don't use it.

Anycubic Grey is my normal go-to resin - it's not any better than white or black, but the white and black both photograph poorly. If that's not a concern, white, black, grey all excellent, green maybe a touch better than excellent.

Anycubic plant-based bio-resin: Really nice, despite being a hideous pastel lime green. Less smelly that Anycubic normal, and has a little flex / "give" to it when properly cured but not over-cured. This is a good resin if you need a little flex. It was a hair more expensive than the others when I bought it, but I bought like a gallon and don't know what the price difference is now.

ESun bio-resin: Excellent resin, terrible bottles - lots of excess resin in the caps that gets everywhere. The clear resin cures a tiny bit yellow/brown but it's still pretty good for clear prints. The yellow resin is really, really strong and tough.

Siraya special purpose: Blu is the strongest UV resin, i believe - I have not tried it. You need to keep it hot, like with an enclosure and a heat lamp. I have, however, tried Easy and Tenacious (at normal room temperature). I didn't love Tenacious on it's own, but I add it 50:50 to my normal resins to give it a little flex. Easy I cannot recommend, I really don't like it despite it being really cheap. I had lots of print failures with Easy.

Nova3D: Was very cheap, but I felt like the details on all my prints were soft and it was super crazy brittle despite messing with different exposure times (since overexposing even great resin makes it brittle). Would not recommend.


Note that resin "smelliness" doesn't bother me; I have my printer room actively venting outside, and don't stay in there when it is printing. So if that is a concern of yours, I didn't really account for it.

Thanksnfor the breakdown Ouze. Any experience of the water washable stuff?

I have not messed with any of that - I have a septic tank/septic fields and a well for water, so that seems like a bad combination for my personal situation .

Going off your experience Ouze, I may chuck a few of the Anycubic plant resin bottles in the cart whilst the sale lasts....

I've been really happy with that hideous pastel lime green one. I mean, I'm painting my prints anyway so.. whatever. I've been using it almost exclusively since I bought it.

What's the difference between the Elegoo "ABS like" and the regular Elegoo stuff? Is one just better in terms of finish and quality, or do they give significantly different results?

Also, how far does 1L tend to go, if printing mostly 28mm minis with the odd larger one? I appreciate there's a lot of variables there, but a rough ballpark figure would be handy.

I haven't printed anything yet, but I was playing with a slicer last night and 1l would get me about 300x 28mm scale velociraptors with laser guns

Note that the slicer does not account for any waste whatsoever, which you will get an amount clinging to items, stuck inside, etc. You may want to drop that estimate by 8-12% from my experience.

The ABS like version is supposed to not get so brittle, but depends on how long you post cure - just keep it to the point where thin items are slightly still bendy.

ABS stays slightly bendy, yea. But I'm getting some mad warping with it. I hope hairdryers and boiling water are still a thing for this resin.

 Paradigm wrote:
What's the difference between the Elegoo "ABS like" and the regular Elegoo stuff? Is one just better in terms of finish and quality, or do they give significantly different results?

Also, how far does 1L tend to go, if printing mostly 28mm minis with the odd larger one? I appreciate there's a lot of variables there, but a rough ballpark figure would be handy.

Depending on your slicer, it should tell you the total volume of the print. This is pretty much the only pre-print method of determining how much resin it's going to take to print a model (post-printing method includes volume displacement method to determine the total volume).

 lord_blackfang wrote:
ABS stays slightly bendy, yea. But I'm getting some mad warping with it. I hope hairdryers and boiling water are still a thing for this resin.

Absolutely not...

The company that comes out with a good resin that still allows the heat bending fix will corner the market.

Just to chime in, I have used the Elegoo water-washable. It's low odor, and has a chalky finish. It feels really good and I think it's very helpful for paint to stick to it. It's very brittle, though.
It's also not that big of a plus while cleaning, you still need to cure and filter the used water, before disposing of it, same as with IPA.
Furthermore, if you only clean the prints with water, there is white stuff in recesses after curing. So I clean it with IPA anyway... all the reasons why my next bottle is Elegoo ABS-like.

 Hanskrampf wrote:
Just to chime in, I have used the Elegoo water-washable. It's low odor, and has a chalky finish. It feels really good and I think it's very helpful for paint to stick to it. It's very brittle, though.
It's also not that big of a plus while cleaning, you still need to cure and filter the used water, before disposing of it, same as with IPA.
Furthermore, if you only clean the prints with water, there is white stuff in recesses after curing. So I clean it with IPA anyway... all the reasons why my next bottle is Elegoo ABS-like.

I, on the other hand, use water washable resin with water and an ultrasonic cleaner, and it leaves it absolutely perfect. Afterwards I leave the leftover dirty water at the sun for a time, and after it cures I can dispose of it. Much, much easier.

As for resistance, I've found the water washable marginally less resistant than the ABS-like myself. Nothing to write home about, but eminently usable for miniatures.

I'm leaning toward water washable myself now, I've,seen a few complaints but it seems they're generally settings errors or cleanup problems, which the Wash and Cure machine should mitigate.

Albertorius, would you mind sharing your specific resin and settings? If I can get results like your recent efforts that'll do me just fine!

 Paradigm wrote:
I'm leaning toward water washable myself now, I've,seen a few complaints but it seems they're generally settings errors or cleanup problems, which the Wash and Cure machine should mitigate.

Albertorius, would you mind sharing your specific resin and settings? If I can get results like your recent efforts that'll do me just fine!

Sure, no problem, but I really didn't do much at all ^^. The 50 microns settings I'm using are the OOB for Elegoo grey resin (they come preloaded on the Elegoo Mars settings on Chitubox), and for 20 microns I reduce layer exposure to 6 seconds.

One word of caution regarding water washable (rinsable, really) resin: it is categorically NOT less toxic than regular resin. If anything, it is moreso due to it being more easily absorbed by skin contact. So. Wear. Your. Gloves.

Cheers. Ended up going for NOVA water washable as it was on an Amazon Prime deal and had very good reviews, but as that also recommends 8s for 0.05mm layers I assume the adjustment for 0.02mm will also be similar (though someone please correct me if that's not the case).

I'm planning to start at 0.05 anyway, as that's still double the resolution I print at on the Ender.

One interesting note for me when I started using the Siraya Tech Simple (supposedly only needs 15% IPA) is it was thinner, as in a much lower viscosity. It was the 'smoky black' - semi-transparent and I did not want that, so added just a touch of Elegoo gray and it has worked great, but I needed to bring my exposure down to 5 seconds for .02-.04; 5.5 seconds for .05; and 6 seconds for .06-.07 - I usually do not print items much thicker than .07. It was just a shorter exposure than what they said in the specs.

So, I started to shorten the exposure time by a second or two for my other resins and I seem to be getting much better detail - I might have been overexposing a bit all this time.

I've found that I need to expose about 10% more than what's optimal for detail if I don't want delamination and failed supports.

I just took delivery of 2 litres of the Anycubic bio-resin. When I can find time to start printing (probably around Christmas), I'll post up some comparisons.

I will say the previously mentioned Siraya Tech Simple has been giving me the best prints I have ever gotten from my machine.

...and just as I was finishing my last planned prints (2" scale 1:6) WWI Vickers and Spandau twin machine guns for my large RC planes, my LCD screen is starting to go out with tiny bad spots. This made some holes in some spots on the prints, but easily patched.

I am not sure if I need to rush and get another screen now, as I have no more immediate print plans. But, I am very sad to see my Mars sitting next me me not 100% if some great print comes up that just needs to be done...