I have been printing with FDM printers for a few years now and while they are great for larger items like buildings, I find that they are not very good for small items or items that it is important to not have layer lines. So today I ordered an Elegoo Mars 3 Pro from Amazon. I'm going to have a lot of learning to do for sure. So if you would have any tips and/or tricks for a newbie to resin printing please share them. It will be greatly appreciated. Also is there any sites other than Thingaverse that are good for finding model railroad files?
Hi Jeff - welcome to resin printing! There are so many tips out there I doubt I could remember to cover them all so I'll start with some obscure ones. Buy the tools you need to enable you to enjoy the process. What I mean by that, is if you're printing and you realize you would like some lengthy spring loaded tweezers so you can dunk your parts - buy those tweezers. If you don't have a tank large enough to clean your bigger prints - get one. Get a funnel and some filters so you can pour used (and filtered) resin back into the resin bottles. Make life easy so printing stays fun. Have paper towels or napkins on hand. I have a roll of paper towels next to my printing area for when I need. If you drop a part on the floor that hasn't been cleaned yet, or you have some drips while you're transferring your prints from A to B, you'll have something handy to wipe the mess up with. If you have room, consider getting a silicone mat for your work area. I don't have that much room so I don't have one of these but I can see this being easier to clean up than a regular workbench. Two kinds of spatulas: these printers usually come with two kinds - a plastic one, and a metal one. The metal one is to scrape your print off the build plate. The plastic one is for your vat. I use the plastic one to mix up my resin if the pigments have settled out within the vat. Keep the edge smooth on your FEP and you won't scratch it up unless you have foreign objects/debris in there, or if your spatula is chipped. I always check the edge of the plastic one before using it, and have a bag of spares just in case it needs to be replaced. If you have a print failure where there's junk floating around in the resin, do a full clean of the vat. If you haven't had any failures, your resin can live in that vat forever until the FEP needs to be replaced. I've seen people showing themselves dump the vat out after every print and clean. That's just ridiculous in my opinion. I've had resin sit in vats for over a year that still worked after I did a good spatula mix to it. Speaking of vats - if you get into this and have several resins you like to use frequently, consider getting extra vats and covers so you'll have them ready with little fuss. See first bullet point. Smaller layer height is not always better. Use the full range of layer heights to suit whatever you're printing. I've gone as large as .1mm layer height for buildings or draft prints, and typically .025mm for locomotive shells. .05mm is a happy medium between detail and speed and is what I use for most production prints. .075 is my go-to for draft printing. Push boundaries. Find out what you can get away with and don't assume your printer won't print it. Be mindful of the orientation of your print and supports, and if those are set correctly you can print things you wouldn't have thought you could. I'll stop there. These are just my opinions based on my experiences. I don't have a wash and cure setup so I can't honestly comment on those, but for general printing I've been doing MSLA printing since 2018 and FDM since 2014. Always happy to share my experience with others and learn from folks that have discovered new tricks with this technology. Cheers -Mike
I'm a noobie in resin printing, but find a few key tools to be most useful. The spatula provided with your machine can be useful, but I found the rafts to be very well-adhered to the print plate, so a stainless steel painting knife, (palette knife) like this one (https://www.dickblick.com/items/blick-painting-knife-style-6/) is nice and handy to slip under the raft to work it loose for washing. When the pandemic first hit, isopropyl alcohol was hard to get, so I resorted to denatured alcohol, much more plentiful and cheaper by the gallon. Cleans just as well, although the fumes can be strong, so use good ventilation. Supports are vital. Overhangs without support can cause print failures, and suction can cause warpage and failures. Printing in pieces is better than trying to print a complex model in one piece (Jordan Spreader, steam locomotive etc).
I've printed all of my stuff with a Mars 3 using the waterwashable gray. I'm extremely happy with the quality I get. I'm printing Tgauge (1:450), so most of my stuff is really small (rolling stock, engine shells, buildings, etc.) I do the rolling stock at the maximum resolution (.01) but do the rest of the stuff at standard res (.05). Here's my contribution: 1. Move your prints around so you're not always printing in the center of the bed. It is said this will make your print screen last longer. I don't know. After a while I notice I have more things go wrong if I consistently print in the center. 2. I really like a flexible print bed, like the WhamBam. 3. If you're going to design your own buildings, etc., you might find that using Google Streetview is helpful in the design process. If you find a building you like, you can "walk around" it in streetview, take screenshots and then use them as a guide in your design program (I use Fusion 360). It saves you having to travel to the location so you can get buildings from anywhere streetview has views. 4. I still find I get more hits for things I want to print on Thingiverse than anywhere else. Yeggi is a nice search engine that will also include pay-to-print files. There's also stlfinder, but I don't use that much. 5. To a limited degree, you can scale up and down STL files you will find. If you like an O gauge design, you can scale it down to N, for example, in your slicer. If you get too large or small, you're going to find that tiny details can clump up and get lost. Sometimes it's best to just use the downloaded STL as a guide (import it as a Canvas in F360 and trace it 6. Microsoft's 3D Builder program can be useful and it's free. 7. Here are two URLs I use a lot in design/3D printing. http://www.gardenstatecentral.com/scale_calc.html and https://www.urbaneagle.com/data/RRconvcharts.html
Oh, one more thing. Have some spare FEP on hand. You'll poke a hole in the FEP at the worst possible moment. I also have a spare LED screen for the same reason. Also, there's a r/elegoomars subreddit on reddit.
I've been printing locomotive parts with the Mars 3, works like a treat. You've got a lot of good tips already, I'll just add these: 1. Temperature and fume control are the two reasons to consider a cabinet. You want your resin to be above 70F to work well; if your room already accommodates, cool beans. You do want to work in a ventilated environment, both the resin and the IPA will stink up the place quite a bit, and there's concern about the effects of inhaling resin fumes. You might want to find and download the MSDS documents for the fluids you'll use. 2. I bought extra vats (Elegoo has a two-vat set with covers for the Mars 3) and I store my resin in them, don't pour back in the bottle between print sessions. I use my spatula to stir the resin before printing, both to re-mix the pigment and to look for floaties, bits and pieces that may not have accompanied the previous print. I take the vat off the printer after printing and store it in a cheap plastic tray. I think I'm saving resin by doing all this, because resin is lost doing all that back-and-forth 3. Do wash as a two-part 90% IPA campaign. 90% dries faster than 70%, and IMHO has less chance of leaving resin behind to become chalky deposits. The two-part wash lets you finish in relatively clean IPA, and you don't have to change either as often (part 1 can go really dirty, and part 2 stays pretty clean). 4. I'm using the Elegoo plant-based resin at their recommended settings until further notice, eliminates variables for doing root-cause analysis of other things that might fail. Just me, if you're more ambitious, go for it! I'm writing about my project here: https://glenn.pulpitrock.net/blog/ Many things to consider about modeling and fabricating small locomotive parts... All that said, I'm down right now, re-organizing my printing space next to my wife's wine cellar. Hmm, there might be additional tips in that...
Great stuff guys, keep it coming. I'm coping it all down. Here is a video that I recently saw that seems to make sense... Sumner
#1 for me has always been. DIAL IN YOUR MACHINE! everyone has their own favorite tool for this, I use the Photonsters calibration file 100m which is can be found in the files section of the Anycubic Mono FB group. snag it and you can leave the group. lol 3DRS 'winged' is a pretty popular second option. I place the file in all 4 quadrants of my plate on first prints or new resin tests. this tells me also how flat my plate is and how level my plate is. ive just returned 2 Saturns for bad plates in the last 2 weeks....even after sanding they still would not print on a level. thats another story. #2. as above - plastic spatula for stirring vat. get them on amazon for a bunch dirt cheap. once they get a little rough on the edge or gooey. toss it. 3. also on amazon. get a plastic razor blade device and a bunch of blades. use this to pop parts off your plate. if your settings are right, they slide right off with minor nudge. 3a. OR get a magnectic plate 4. Filters from amazon. and a funnel that fits them well. 5. Set up recurring orders. I get 2L of resin a month and box of ipa every 2 mos on amazon subs. 6. SCREEN PROTECTOR!!! 7. flexvat.com get a roll. 8. Lychee Pro > all imo. best slicer around. 9. theres much more but whats here and above posts is good info. NJOY!!
Not much to add, wow, lots of great info here. The only thing I can think of is to get a silicone spatula (same as those for cooking, the ones made from silicone, in one piece). Never worry about a chipped plastic spatula and oh so soft on the fep I also second the plastic razor blades and handle you can get on Amazon. I stopped using the metal and plastic ones since I switched to the plastic razor/silicone spatula combo. They really get under the print super well. I do use a wash and cure, and really like it. I especially like that I can wash the part right on the build plate, then rinse off in a clean tub of alcohol (yep, two step wash as someone else mentioned!) Finally find a process that works and stick to it, it'll keep everything clean around your workspace.
