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Hey folks, I'm intrested in starting 3d printing, and I have couple of question.

1) what kind of printer to get? I'm currently leaning towards Anycube, with a budget of 200-300euro. It seems like a good starting point. Here's a link;
https://www.anycubic.com/collections/resin-3d-printer/products/photon-mono-4k

2) can i print pre-supported files with it? Here's an example of product I'm intrested;
https://red-makers.com/product/death-division-kill-squad-imperial-force/

1. That's a reasonably good printer. You definitely want a monochrome screen (which this is) and as good an xy resolution as you can afford (this is 35 micron, which is pretty good). Build area isn't huge, so you won't be printing terrain, but should be fine with most gaming models, etc.

2. Yup. Pre-supported files just mean you don't have to go add in supports on your own. Regardless of pre-supported or not, you will still need to load the files into your printer's specific slicing software (typically Chitubox or Lychee, though I think Anycubic has their own, too) to set it up for your printer and tell it what layer height, exposure time, etc.

Hi, thanks for the advice, I really appreciate it. Mostly, I would print gaming models, infantry and tanks. Is the printer capable of printing tanks (leman russ sized model)?

Is It recommended to get some sort of washing machine? I've built resin models before, but never washed them..

As for tanks, it'll kinda depend on how the STL is split up into parts. One-piece, no way. Multiple parts, maybe with a few runs with different parts on the plate, but depending on the size of some parts you might not be able to fit them in the build area.

You *must* have some kind of washing and curing post-processing. Once printed, you need to rinse off the parts with IPA or denatured alcohol (unless using a water washable resin, which by most accounts is generally a little less durable, but YMMV), and then do some final curing with a UV light. Some folks just stick the washed models in a window for sunlight curing, but depending on where you are that may not be super efficient.

You don't need to have a special wash station, though. You can do it with a couple jars of IPA and splash them around, then air dry. If you have the space and cash, though, the wash and cure stations can really help your workflow. Definitely hit YouTube and do a search on resin 3d printing, there's a lot to it that you should be aware of before going in.

Also keep in mind that 3d printer UV resin is not the same as cast resin, and you will need lots of nitrelle gloves and paper towels for clean up, and the uncured stuff is very toxic and should not be disposed of without curing first (don't pour it down the drain, not even your washing liquid that has been contaminated with the resin!).

Right now if I were getting started I'd grab a Mars 3 printer. It's a similar size to the one you are looking at and the Mars 3 is a very reliable solid brand of printer. It's cheap, has a 4K screen and a good build size for infantry.


For tanks you can build most on such a printer, BUT it will take quite a few builds to do. If you are going to do lots of tanks and titans and bigger things you might look at something like a Saturn or Mighty 4K printer (Saturn 2 and Mighty 8K are now on the market with better resolutions, but they are also going to cost you more). The 9inch build plate printers are a bit more practical for bigger things.
But it all depends on your budget and starting with a smaller printer is certainly a good call for getting used to 3D printing, learning what is what and also keeping your costs down when getting all the accessories and such is going to be a pretty significant cost to get going.


Accesssories:

1) Safety Gear - https://printhunter.org/3d-printing-health-and-safety-tips/
That link has advice both on safe practice and also safety gear you need to own. 3D printing comes with risks (note water washable resin is 100% the same risk as regular resins because the really nasty stuff is the photo-activeated element which is the same in any light curing resin); but so long as you respect those risks and take proper precautions and wear the right gear, you'll be fine.

2) As its getting cooler in many regions check this out as well https://printhunter.org/printing-and-temperature/

Note many have had good luck with brewers belts and standard lizard thermostats for controlling/adjusting temperatures as well. The Belt is placed around the VAT directly.

3) Ontop of safety gear and potentially heating gear, you also want

a) Silicon Spatula - for anything relating to the VAT. The plastic ones most printers come with are basically useless as they are too rough.

b) Blue Towels - or any other generally cheap absorbant towel for wiping things down and cleaning up

c) White Lithium Grease - for lubricating the Z axis rod - important upkeep and maintenance of the machine. One tube will go a long long way.

d) File/Whetstone - the metal scrapers most printers come with had flat dull front edges. A quick sharpen (or just get a sharpened one new) and it will glide over the build plate and slip under the resin to get prints off. Otherwise it mashes up to the side and its a nightmare getting prints off.

Note as you gain experience you'll find you use things less and less. Eg you'll go through gloves slower as you get fewer fails and thus don't have to keep restarting things; you'll get cleaner in how you operate so that's less cleaning up material etc....

Okay, thank you guys for all the advice. I'll have to check some safety equipment also. Now, I'm curious about the tank design.

 Spreelock wrote:
Okay, thank you guys for all the advice. I'll have to check some safety equipment also. Now, I'm curious about the tank design.

If you know what tank can you link it? It might already know if the designer commonly supports for smaller printers and such.

Sure, here's the link

https://red-makers.com/product/legendary-battle-tank-imperial-force/

So I don't know that tank, however looking at how they've parted it as they've got an assembly video, I'd be shocked if its not supported for the Mars printer. Which is one of the smaller build plates and is the standard to which many presupport parts to fit.

So whilst it might take a while to print all the parts, I would expect it to print on a smaller printer.

Hi guys, I've been doing some research by watching YouTube videos and tutorials, and I came in to a conclusion that I wanted to print bigger models (such as tanks and monsters). I'm intrested in Anycubic photon mono x, here's a link to the product;
https://www.anycubic.com/collections/anycubic-photon-3d-printers/products/photon-mono-x-resin-printer

The workhorse for that budget and printer sieze is the Saturn printer. I've heard less about the Photon Mono X, but the Saturn is a very popular machine and seems to be nearly about the same price point from my 5 seconds of googling.

I'm not saying the Photon Mono X is bad nor good, just that I've not heard as much about it.

I can't offer any advise on the printer side of things, I'm a PLA printer guy myself.

I would like to point you towards my favourite creator on cults though, he makes some excellent free guard vehicles that might be just up your alley:

https://cults3d.com/en/users/nfeyma/creations

Hey guys, I decided to buy elegoo saturn s printer, alongside mercury plus 2.0 washing machine.
I was convinced by the quality of elegoo printers after watching YouTube reviews, and the saturn s has even bigger build area. It was also reviewed as less noisy. Also, I picked up 3kg of EcoResin, and 1liter of Ipa.
I still got couple of question;

1) how often do you clean the resin vat? After each print, or by the end of the day? Some videos in YouTube had their resin in vat for month or so..

2) how often do you change the washing liquid?

3) how much time for washing? How much time for curing? I've not found direct answer to this topic..

Personally, I only clean the vat for one of three reasons:

1) Failed print. Can't say that I'm cleaning it as such, just draining it and making sure that I've got all the failed stuck on bits out of there.

2) Changing to a different resin.

3) Replacing the FEP because I'm starting to get nervous about it.

I've left resin in the vat for a few weeks with no problems. It separates, so it needs a gentle stir to get it back in order, then I'm good to go.


I change washing liquid when I start to think that it it's getting iffy, preferably before it leaves a slight film on my supposedly washed prints. IPA seems to have more life in it than water - I swap out water every 3 or 4 goes (obviously for water washable resin only...)



In a wash'n'cure I wash for 12 mins, cure thin stuff for 2, thick stuff for 3.

Everyone develops their own preferences, there aren't any hard and fast rules. I've come to the conclusion that this printing lark is just one big, ongoing experiment!


You're going to need more than 1l of IPA, BTW. Especially if you're using a wash'n'cure!

A few thoughts:

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKzkQZOczVI

Watch that video for how to clean the VAT after you get a fail. He covers the same method with several types of printer as there's a few ways to do it. That method will lose you very little resin and is a lot faster, cleaner and easier than draining the VAT each time you get a fail. Especially when you are new and more likely to have fails as you learn the ins and outs.

You'd VAT clean (above method) after every failed print. You do not want any material left in the VAT as when the build plate comes down it comes down it doesn't stop on pressure, so if you leave stuff in there it will get crushed into the screen underneath.


As for changing resin out, once you use the VAT clean above, I'd only clean out the resin for checking/changing the FEP (you'd get random fails to give you a hint something is wrong and once you eliminate other variables, FEP condition could well be it). Other than that changing the resin to a different type.

As long as resin doesn't get any UV light on it, it won't really do much when left. It will separate out (some are fast and do this in half an hour, some take ages). A Silicon Spatula is am invaluable tool to get as you can use it to stir the resin in the VAT and it won't hurt the FEP. It's also good for helping to nudge/scrape the resin out when pouring out the resin into a resin filter (not you want a plastic funnel as well as resin filters are only paper and won't stand up on their own - resin filter into funnel - funnel into bottle).


2) So what I do is a 2-3 stage wash.

a) A very quick wash in a smaller container (plastic pickle jars are very popular). This is with the model on the supports right off the build plate. It's the most mucky and covered in resin and this one gets the bulk off.
This wash will be about 30seconds of shaking the container (lid on).

b) With that done I remove the supports and chuck them in a container to be cured later. It doesn't matter if they have some wet resin on them, it will all get cured anyway and you don't care about smudges or detail loss on the supports.

c) I then put the model parts into the main wash and cure container. This does the main washing action. Note if I have very small parts I might leave them on the supports as wash and cures tend to have big grills on the cages - another optoin is using a smaller cage (eg the one that comes in a plastic pickle jar!) to hold the smaller parts.

With IPA this wash will be a few mins - 3 or 4 or so.

d) Finally I'd remove the parts and you can then give them a 10second dunk in a 3rd container. This would purely be to rinse and check that the resin is clean by seeing that there's no cloud of resin coming off. You can leave this one out or do it only when the main container (part c) is looking very cloudy.


With this method you get the majority off in a smaller container so replacing the washing liquid in there isn't as costly and it keeps the bulk of your washing liquid clean for as long as possible.
Note washing is basically done via agitation so just leaving parts to sit won't do very much.






NOTES:
1) The above is true for regular resins that wash with IPA (isopropal alcohol). You can also use denatured alcohol just the same. Higher concentrations tend to work best/quicker.
NOTE it will damage the resin. If you wash for too long you will harm the resin surface which can cause all kinds of strange effects once cured. So washing is about vigorous action not length of time.

2) Some people use acetone to clean, however that very much eats into the resin very fast so washing with that is down to 10s of seconds before harm is done to the resin.

3) Water washable resins are broadly the same though its my impression (I've not used them) that you can wash for longer without detrimental impact to the resin.
NOTE That Water Washable Resin is still highly toxic in an uncured state and water that comes into contact with the uncured resin is contaminated and requires proper disposal.



NOTE Eco resins are still highly toxic when uncured. The main toxicity comes from the photo-activated component which is the same no matter the resin (water washable, regular or eco). As a result you still need all the same safety gear, the same operating practice and curing everything before any disposal.





Disposal - allow IPA/Water to evapourate off naturally and then allow UV light (eg sun or other) to cure any remaining residue. IPA is generally a lot easier for this as it evapourates very readily.
There are ways to recycle IPA for further use by leaving it in a clear container for a long long time in sunlight (weeks to months depending on where in the world you are). Then pouring the resulting IPA through a coffee filter and reusing it. Of course filter requires curing and then disposing.
Long slow curing works best for this as it allows the resin particles to cure and settle out - some people have done it with fast curing but it leaves a lot more suspended in the liquid so chokes up the filter super fast.




CURING TIME Broadly speaking you can't overcure*.
A lot of people say you can and that overcuring makes resin brittle. In actuality all that's happened is the resin has reached its final fully cured state and its a more brittle material than many are used too (esp those from a DnD background more used to PVC models). Different resins also cure to a different state and some really are super fragile and others super strong.
It's also complicated because a good many sculptors sculpt "realscale" from a digital background and this results in things like swords and such which are ultra thin and very fragile even with tougher resins.

In general my approach is blasting all sides in the curing chamber for 30mins and then I tend to leave the model on a windowsill for a day or so. This letter stage also allows the resin time to degas.
Curing is generally a case of "cure and cure some more until it feels done". Which can be why there's a lot of variation on times and no set policy as some thicker parts will take longer to cure etc...


*You can but we are talking weeks/months/years in sunlight to hit damaging levels.

Hi, thank you guys, I really appreciate all the help. I think I've got all the necessary safety gear (nitrile gloves, respirators and glasses). I'd have to buy some more ipa..

Hey guys, a quick update on my progress;
I received my printer on friday, which i spent assembling machinery and carefully reading instructions. I've started printing on saturday, and I was surpriced that my first print was absolutely perfect. I printed 8 guardsmen on one plate.
My next print was bases for the models, which failed, because I tried to add supports (the supports broke). So I had to clean my resin tank. My 3rd print of the day was better, all but one base came out good, but that one Base was stuck on the FEP film. I've managed to clean it out of the film, but just to be sure I also cleaned the whole tank.

Overall, I think 3 prints per day is a bit too much work for me (especially with failed prints). It's been real fun and alot to learn, but it's getting better the more I print. And the results are awesome.

A few things to help out

1) https://atlas3dss.com/learn
Head there, download the test print and watch the video. Calibration is really important and will help you get better quality prints

2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKzkQZOczVI
Watch for a great method to help you clean the vat really fast after a fail which wastes far less time and very little resin in the process.