Part 1: Why Get a Resin 3d Printer
So there’s two types of 3d printers out there. The type you’ve probably seen, where there’s a strip of plastic being melted and printed down from a little nozzle is what’s called an FDM printer. They’re good at printing larger stuff, can print in multiple colors, and less hazardous in general than resin printers, but far less focused on small details. You can print minis with them, but if you want to print miniatures and models for various games (cough40kcough) you’re going to want a resin printer.
Resin 3d printers (hereafter just 3d printers) work by dropping a metal plate into a pool of liquid resin above what amounts to a phone screen that emits UV light. The resin is hardened to the metal plate, lifted up, and then repeated for as many layers are there are in the model (typically 500-1200). There’s a few main types of resin printer, with monochrome vs color and 2k vs 4k being the main differences. I highly recommend getting a mono printer (leads to longer life for the emitter) and recommend 4k resolution because go big or go home.
The most obvious reason to get a 3d printer is to make miniatures for various tabletop games. I’m not saying that I’ve printed out an entire Warhammer army with mine, but its certainly something someone could do. You can also make really good looking models and figures (though you’ll have to paint them if you want them not the color of your resin). If you want to print a gun, or other mechanical stuff, you’ll want to look at an FDM printer. If you don’t want to do any of this stuff, then… thank for reading? Hope you enjoy my wit?
With the reasons why you might want one of these out of the way, let’s move on to what you need to get started.
Part 2: What you need
A 3d printer: There’s several different brands out there of 3d printers. I’d recommend Phrozen’s Sonic Mini or the Elegoo line, but I’m pretty sure there’s at least two other major manufacturers out there so feel free to look into them more. I’ll be writing this assuming you got the Phrozen Sonic Mini 4k because that’s what I have, but the advice should go for whichever one you want. The Sonic Mini 4k is about $350, while most 2k printers I’ve seen are about $250.
Resin: The stuff you print with. Most brands will work just fine, though each will require specific settings. I’ve used the Phrozen Aqua Gray 4k to great success, recently finishing the bottle, and am currently using the Siraya Tech Fast Navy Grey. I’ve heard good things about mode of Siraya’s resins so I’d recommend one of those to start but it really depends on your budget/what strength you need. Resin will typically run between $30-40 a liter, though if you want something harder and stronger it can run up to $90 a liter. A liter is a good amount and lasted me about a month of printing two plates a day nearly every day.
Isopropyl Alcohol: To clean your prints of excess resin, the vast majority of resins require 90-99% IPA. It’s not super expensive, I got 12 pints for $25. You’ll also want a tub to contain it with a lid, I got 12” x 6”one from a grocery store for $10. Also, you’ll want a toothbrush to clean off excess resin. Anything will work here, so grab the one from the dollar store.
UV Lamp/Curing station: So when you finish printing and washing, your models are going to still be rather toxic, so you’ll need to cure them with UV light. I got a pretty good power one and a spinny clear turntable for around $25, and combined with the printer’s box lined with foil it works great. There exist wash and cure stations for $100+, grab one of those if you want but the box and light method works fine. I’d advise against fingernail lamps, but they technically work, just slower and more annoyingly. Also, you can technically just use sunlight, just cure for like triple the recommended time.
Respirator: You’re working with some chemicals that you’d probably prefer to not breathe in. If you already have one for spray paint, that’ll work great, otherwise you can pick one up for like $25-30.
Safety Glasses: I’d rather not have resin or alcohol splash into my eyes if I mess something up. Get a pair of glasses for like under $5, you don’t need anything besides the surface.
Paper Towels: You’re gonna spill resin. It’s inevitable. When you do, you want something disposable to clean up with.
Garbage can: You don’t really want to have to mix normal garbage with chemical contaminated garbage. Plus, you don’t want to have to move contaminated garbage somewhere far. Just buy a cheap can and some bags for like $10.
Metal Scraper: Your printer will probably come with one, but you’ll almost certainly want a better/bigger one. I got a paint scraper from my local hardware store for $5
Funnel and filters: You’re gonna have failures or want to empty the vat. These help you make sure that you’re not getting any cured resin bits into your bottle, and also help you to not spill. I got them for $12
Flash drive: You store your prints and transfer them using flash drives. Your printer will likely come with one, but its from China, don’t trust that shit. Buy some of your own for, what, a nickle? I spent like $15 for a pack of 5, which was way overkill. Spend like $10, max.
Computer with Chitubox or Lychee slicer installed: This gets into the technical stuff, but in order to prepare a file to be 3d printed you need a slicing software. Chitubox is the industry standard, but Lychee is what I use and would recommend. There’re paid versions, but the free version for both is perfectly fine. I’ll assume you have a computer.
And last, but absolutely not least, Nitrile Gloves: I assume latex work fine, as do acrylic, but I’ve had the least issues with nitrile gloves. You do NOT EVER want to touch uncured/liquid resin with your bare skin. From what I’ve heard, it’s a pretty bad skin irritant. Get yourself like 100 to start and don’t be surprised when you plow through them. I’ve had the most success with Dollar General’s brand, which are also $20 for 100.
Part 3: Safety
Now you’ve acquired all the stuff you’ll need, it’s time to go into the safety procedures that you should absolutely follow. Resin 3d printing, when done correctly, is super safe and to my knowledge not harmful long term (but I’m not a doctor, don’t take my medical advice). That said, there’s a lot of things that you can easily mess up out of ignorance that can result in not ideal outcomes.
Make sure your room is well ventilated.
This probably could have gone in the supplies section, because you absolutely need some form of ventilation in the room you print in. This doesn’t need to be elaborate, just a window or open door will do, but its very necessary. The fumes aren’t nearly as bad as some on the internet would have you believe, but they do exist and you probably don’t want to be concentrating them in your house/garage. Let everything air out as you’re printing/cleaning, your lungs will thank you.
Keep track of contaminated/non-contaminated surfaces.
When you work with resin, it’s not really feasible to be changing gloves every other task. You’re gonna take shortcuts to make your life easier, and you’re gonna grab the scraper with the hands you just used to take off the resin covered build plate. This is fine as long as you accept that there are items that you touch only with gloves on and those you touch only with gloves off. This ensures that you avoid contaminating any surfaces (like door handles or flash drives) that you don’t want resin on or would be impossible to only interact with with gloves on.
Don’t touch the chemicals with skin.
Pretty much speaks for itself, the stuff is not great for your skin or the skin of children/pets. Keep stuff secured if those are a concern and make sure you keep surfaces clean with alcohol. Wear long pants and socks when you’re working. I keep separate clothes for 3d printing.
Wash your hands afterwards.
You shouldn’t have anything on you, but better safe than sorry.
Don’t dispose of used resin/alcohol/other supplies simply.
Again, this stuff is not great for you or the environment. I tend to leave my garbage can in the sun after using it so that cures any resin left on it. Old alcohol, I return to the bottles and leave under my UV lamp for a few minutes (and will eventually bring to a hazardous waste disposal). If you use any water, expose it to your UV lamp and filter it out before dumping it down the drain.
Now that we’ve gone through everything that you need before turning on the printer, let’s get to the fun stuff.
Part 4: Your First Print
To start printing, you begin at your computer with a flash drive. You’ll need a file designed to be a first print, of which there are plenty. Thingiverse, MyMiniFactory, and cults3d are all great sites to find STL files on, the primary filetype that you’ll use to 3d print.
Once you have the file you want (again, make sure it’s a beginner print, don’t do anything fancy just yet, we’re dialing in settings), open your slicer of choice. As I use Lychee, I’m going to write this assuming you are too, but Chitubox isn’t too different. You’ll have to set up your printer, but don’t worry, there should be a box where you can find your specific model and import the settings. Once you have that, you should see a nice model of the size of your build plate. Now you can open the model and it’ll show it to you on the plate. Make sure it’s within the plate, and move to export the file.
Now is the trickiest part for beginning, and likely where you’ll need to do the most work. You need to edit the settings of your resin. Luckily, no matter what resin you’re using, someone has probably already figured out settings for it. You just need to find them. There’s various forums and subreddits that can help, but googling “your 3d printer your resin settings” is a pretty good first step. Once you have them, you’ll see a whole bunch of settings that won’t mean anything to you. You don’t need to understand them yet, just know that they need to be changed. So open up the resin setting tab in the pre-print screen and add a resin. The screen should give you the option for brand, name, and color, but those don’t actually matter that much. The fillables underneath are what you’re after. Edit the fillables with the values that you found searching and save the resin.
Chances are, you messed something up like I did my first time, but it’s not that big a deal. Worst case, you’re out about 3 hours of time and like $0.20 of resin. Regardless, export the slices to file, saving it to your flashdrive. Once it finishes up, pull out the flash drive, grab a piece of paper and the allen wrench the printer came with, and head over to your 3d printer.
Now it’s time to get funky. First off, plug in the flash drive into the slot on the printer. Next, put on your gloves. Next, unscrew the empty vat and set it aside. Turn on your printer, and find the build plate leveling option. You’re going to need to unscrew the allen screws connecting the build plate and do whatever the screen tells you. Once you finish up, screw the screw back in, and end the leveling, put the vat back in place.
Now, take your resin, and making sure the cap is on tight,
shake it vigorously for like a minute.
Once it’s been shaken well, put on your glasses and respirator, open up
the resin, and pour in enough to fill the vat about half-way. Don’t do any more than that, and you can
honestly do less, printing this first model should use milliliters. Once its all poured in, cover the printer
back up, and find the file on your printer’s touchscreen. Click on it, press play, and then the printer
should start up. And now you wait.
If everything works out, after 1-3 hours your print will be done. Hooray! If you can see it stuck to the build plate as it’s supposed to be, congrats, your settings are pretty much all set and you can move on to bigger and better things. If, however, there’s just a splotch of cured resin on the plate, don’t worry! Failures happen, and this is where you learn. Either way, you’re going to want to scrape off the cured product into your vessel full of alcohol. If you succeeded, skip on to the next part. If it was a failure, however, you have a few things you’ll need to do. First, unscrew the vat. Get your filter and open up the resin bottle. Drain all the resin from the vat back into the bottle, making sure it all goes through the filter. This helps get rid of any cured bits of resin that didn’t stick to the plate which could possibly mess things up in the future. Finally, look at the vat itself. There might be some resin that cured and stuck to the FEP film, in which case, get a new pair of gloves and the plastic scraper that came with your printer. Press gently under the cured resin and use the plastic scraper to peel off any cured resin, and dump it into the alcohol. Then replace the vat, and clean up any spilled resin with paper towels and alcohol.
At this point, you’ll need to take off your gloves, grab the flash drive, and figure out where your settings went wrong. Make sure you’re copying the correct values into each of the forms, and if you’re sure everything is right, try finding alternative settings for your resin. Some people have different luck with different settings. Again, there’re facebook groups and forums that can help you here. If you still can’t figure out where you messed up, screenshot your settings and someone should be able to help out. But once you believe you’ve fixed up the settings, start over again, repeating as necessary until your print looks right.
Part 5: Cleaning and curing
So you have your model printed (along with any waste). Great! It should be in the alcohol and your gloves, ventilator, and glasses should be on. At this point, you’ll want to take your toothbrush and use it to gently clean the entire model. This helps get any uncured resin that’s still hanging out off and makes your print’s details pop much better. Once you’re satisfied, you’ll want to set the print (and any cured waste resin) off to the side on a paper towel to dry. Make sure you give it adequate time to do so, as curing when there’s still moisture on your print can result in some issues. But once everything is dry, it’s time to cure.
Set your print on the turntable and turn on the UV light. I typically cure for about 2 minutes, then flip the model and go another 2 minutes to make sure everything is getting adequate amounts of UV light. Once you’ve done this, you can now handle the print with bare skin completely safely. Congrats! You’ve successfully printed a 3d model. Take any waste that you might have, and toss that under the UV light too to make it safe to dispose of (or you can just put your trash into sunlight for a few minutes after you add waste to it, that works ok).
Part 6: More complex models
Your first model should have been one that was designed to be printed as is, nothing fancy needed beyond rendering the file and pressing print. But if you’re getting into this hobby, you’ll likely want to print something more complex, either miniatures, figures, or technical pieces. Those will, in general, require more work than your initial print. This work will largely come in the form of supports.
What are supports? Well, if you noticed, your build plate prints your model upside down. For your initial print, everything printed had something printed immediately below it, but a more complex print might have dangly bits, a weapon, or an arm that are free floating. These will require something that connects them to the build plate so they don’t fail and just fall off into the resin. Hence, supports.
Some models you find will be presupported, and those are great. Just do the same for those that you did initially and you should be fine. However, most will not be, and you’ll have to do your own. Your software might come with an auto-support tool (Lychee pro does at least) and by all means, use that, it should get you started nicely. However, even after doing so, there’ll still be some “islands” that have nothing under them that you’ll have to manually support. Luckily, you should be told how many and where such islands are, and should be able to support them easily enough (though some might take fiddling). Other prints might have areas that don’t get supported but to your might seem under-supported (as fragile parts might break without enough supports), so you’ll have to add to those too.
Unfortunately, a lot of this is not well suited to a text format. At some point in the near future, I hope to run through how I support a model in a video, but without seeing your exact file I can’t say where you’ll need to add supports. You’ll have to go through trial and error, or find other videos of people going through their software and adding supports. As long as you are willing to accept some failures and aren’t impatient, the process will get easier and before long you’ll be breezing through it like a pro.
Part 7: Conclusions
3d printing is cool as hell. The feeling of holding up something that you put work and effort into, that you spent 4 prints across 3 days fixing is fantastic. It is not easy and not for everyone, and there’s a lot of things that can give you all sorts of issues, but the rewards are great. The sky is the limit too, as you can make your own models in various programs, edit those of others, and possibly even sell your models to recoup all the costs associated with the printer. If you’ve been interested in 3d printing, the costs keep going down and the quality keeps going up. If you’ve wanted to play uh… ConflictAxe 50000, say, the costs of buying an army are roughly equal to those of buying a printer and printing an army, and everything after that is gravy.
Good luck, and have fun
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