The New 3D Printing Thread

Hi Super,

There are machines out there that can make much larger pieces, but at a much larger price also. They are commercial machines and cost 10's of 1,000's. For a change these smaller machines are a spin off from the commercial offerings, one of the main differences and the reason for the cost difference is that the larger commercial machines are often driven using a laser with a set of moving mirrors which effectively draw the design into the layers.

With the cheaper designs they use a different technique to expose the light sensitive resin to light. In fact these very cheapest models actually use spin off tech from the mobile phone world. Fundamentally it uses a phone LCD screen driven by a phone graphics chip to display the pixels to be printed and the remainder to be blocked and a UV light source shines through this onto the bottom of the resin vat which is made from a special type of transparent film. This causes the resin in contact with the plastic to solidify which merges with the previous layer, etc...

So fundamentally it all sounds very easy, but in reality is not

This printer seems to be getting rave reviews everywhere, seems I picked a good one again, just like I did with the Ender 3 when i was dipping my toe in the FDM market

Some years ago I was speaking with the handy man at work, discussing how 3D Printers worked, including the then industrial exclusive resin printers. I Proposed this very thing, with a UV curable resin he had just been talking about, a UV Lamp and a butchered Samsung tablet (because it would be android based and could be easily rooted and a custom rom installed that would allow the image to be controlled from a remote source (ie the computer) Having had 0 experience with 3D Printing that was as far as it got, I had no idea about slicing etc and never pursued it. who knew that years later my wife would be the one that got into 3D Printing and I would start to learn a bit about all that, only to then be hunting spare parts for repairing my kids trains that i buy job lots of broken ones of. I beleive my wife is now interested in the resin printing but is concerned about having everything around small children.


 

Nice to see you've managed to adapt my 3D meshes into Plarail meshes, although I'd suggest altering how you have skewed them in some ways.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3330444

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3330401

Boiler and chimney on the Manning Wardle looks really off, any way you can rework your mesh to have a circular smokebox?

These have been taken down, was this you or thingiverse? My wife is just getting into 3D Printing and I am putting in requests for train parts for my 2 boys trains on a more frequent basis now. I am intending on learning how to do the 3D Modelling myself to make things as impressive as a replacement shell!