Resin printing , What I have learned so far

[Barc 1]

Ok my leap into 3 D printing has been great. Can’t say enough good stuff about the Anycubic Photon Mono. It has been flawless.

Prints fast with it’s mono LCD Screen. It can print a 132 car body in just under 3 hours.

Having said that other reviews say all of these newer resin printers are about the same, and price becomes the deciding factor. Just make sure you are comparing apples to apples. I.e Monoscreen to mono screen.

Using the base Anycubic resin I have detected almost no odor while printing. My wife, who can smell a cigarette being lit in the car in front of us on the highway, smells nothing in the house. Switching to simple green floor cleaner and moving away from IPA has really improved the wash process. Any odor from cleaning just makes you think of a nice clean house. The Mr Green stuff was a little too intense, but this simple green is much milder in odor.

I have had 3 failures. One required cleaning the transparent FEP in the resin tray where the print stuck to the film and not the build platform. This was caused by an insufficient build structure base and not burning in the first layers long enough. I upped the exposure time on the burn in layers by 5 seconds, and the next print was fine. The other two were caused by models not having sufficient wall thickness, which brings me to my next learning.

I am active in143 scale, and rescaled 132 files down to 143 scale. This won’t work on some files. The wall thickness is also reduced to a point where it is no longer viable for printing, and two failures were a result of this fact. If anyone knows or has experience with software that lets you add wall thickness to a file, please let me know. Maybe this is a setting on my slicer or 3D builder software that I am missing? This lead me into my next finding.

Vlad just sent me a Porsche Can Am file and it is printing as I write. Chappy sent me the Ferrari 312P. This whole experience would be pointless without the unselfish sharing of files others are doing in this community. Between Thingiverse and others, the amount of files out there for free download is amazing. To those people , I send out a heartfelt thank you. It is people like you who are advancing this technology to the consumer level. A person like myself with no Cad or printing experience, can purchase the equipment and be printing files immediately. A true sign the tech has arrived.

Next up for me is resin mixing. The base resin I am using has no odor, prints well, but is too brittle for a slot car chassis, I need to order some Tenacious labeled resin and try mixing it at different concentrations to find a result that has some flex. Others have done it and it seems like 1/3 works quite well. Not sure how much odor there is to the Tenacious stuff, but I guess I will find out.

Cheers

Dan

[Lou E]

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts, I’ll probably be picking up a resin printer early next year, once I get my regular printer dialed in again, so I can print all the detailed things I was never able to do with the regular printer. Things like figures and detail parts for the cars.

[Gipper]

I may have a simple solution to your wall thickness issue if you can use tinker cad. After scaling your body down to the desired scale make a duplicate of the body and scale it down in whatever dimension needs to be made thicker. After doing so align the bodies using the align tool and then combine the 2 bodies into a single object. So if you want to make the sides a 1/2 mm thicker make the duplicate body 1mm narrower then center it with the original and combine into a single object. Just make sure the 2 bodies overlap and you are good to go. Keep in mind it will change dimensions of everything so you may have to cut away some sections of the duplicate body to avoid thickening areas that you don't want to thicken or may get distorted from being made narrower. Hope that makes sense and helps.

[Barc 1]

I am using MS Builder but think I can do the same thing on that. Thanks for this suggestion as it sounds easy enough

Cheers

[GT40 Racer (DM)]

How strong is the resin? Would it be suitable to print a chassis?

[Kevan]

Resin isn't as resilient as filament but tough resin should easily withstand the rigours of slot car racing for hardbody type racing.

[stumbley]

All of this has been very edifying. I have an Ender 3 that I've modified to dual extrusion to print body + dissolvable supports, and I have a Qidi Tech Shadow 6.0 resin printer on order that will be here for Christmas. Looking forward to printing on both to see what turns out better. The Ender 3 can print nylon, so chassis/motor pods will be done on that one.

[mattb]

You guys are sharp!

[slothead]

I hope you guys are checking out the conversations on Mr. Flippant's weekly slot car zoom meetings. The main topics recently have been building brass chassis and printing bodies - filament & resin.

[stumbley]

The zoom meetings are ones with a wealth of knowledge. With Dennis Samson attending, viewers get insight into chassis building from one of the very best. Somehow, I've managed to miss most of them to my dismay.

[Barc 1]

Dodged a bullet today. Had a print failure and was doing my routine resin cleanup after such an event, which means pouring out the resin and cleaning the FEP. The FEP had become damaged, and was probably one print away from a failure due to a hole. When this happens the resin runs out all over your printer, so not something you want. I had ordered replacement FEP sheets soon after I bought the printer, but they seem to be taking forever to get to me. Until they get here my printer is laid up. So I would suggest to people that they order these consumable FEP sheets when you buy the printer, as you will need them and printing stops when the one you are using has an issue. I was unaware how crucial these FEP sheets are to resin printing. Mine lasted for one litre of resin. I had checked it numerous times and it never showed any signs of problem until this last print failure. Then there were 3 areas of concern where it looks like the structure never pulled off of the FEP sheet and pinpoint stretched an area of the sheet to almost failure. A little strange as my burn in times and layers have remained constant, and I haven’t been doing anything different.

So a resin printer without Extra FEP is like driving a car with no spare tire.

I have been playing in MS builder as it comes free with Windows 10. Can’t print anything so I can spend time learning the CAD software. I am Focused on designing a sidewinder chassis for the proxy right now, and sure wish I could print out some of these to see how well they will work🙁

Cheers

Dan

[Kevan]

With a SW pod depending on the motor type and choice of bearings you'll find they'll need to be at least 2mm wider then the length of the motor or they'll break when you push the motor in. I found the best method was let the motor fit without having to flex the print, then use retainers for the motor or even just glue it in.

[chappyman66]

I will say a few things about pods:

1) there is a reason Slot.it carries the spherical bearings in the outer "ears" - axle spacing to ensure centerline to motor centerline matters if you plan to use Slot.it gears (not required by any means, but useful). This is why Alexis's design is interesting to me. A corollary is that motor/can size and shape matters for SW, less so for AW.

2) Material and print parameters affect strength so what works in one material may or may not in a different material.....D3D learned that years ago. Be prepared for failures, not disappointed by them.

3) Kevan is right, home printed work best with a dab of glue. I have several cars running home printed pods but they all need a little dab for the motor to stay reliably seated. This doesn't bother me since I have been known to glue motors to commercial pods as well.

[Barc 1]

I was going with the idea of screw mounts for the motor utilizing the tapped holes the motors come with. Motor will drop in with ease and not require any chassis flex. That was the plan.

[Kevan]

Here's my final (for now) SW pod, see how thick the walls are either end of the motor, those walls are 3.2mm thick.

Those bearing mounts are for SlotIt spherical type retained by m2 grubscrews top & bottom with about 1mm of adjustment.