Becoming Disillusioned With the Utility of Resin Printed Components

[Lissanro]

> It sure seems like an FDM printer is a better choice for me; stronger, more flexible parts and easier to use.  Can somebody tell me where I'm wrong in my thinking?

Printer is just a printer. If you buy flexible resin, you will produce flexible parts. If you buy semi-flexible resin (for example FUNGDO High Toughness) - you will get semi-flexible parts at small thickness or touch and strong parts at sufficiently large thickness. There is also FUNGDO Low Viscosity ABS-like resin, it is slightly more heat resistant than real ABS and has excellent adhesion, I can print much more parts without supports. For example, on this photo you can see example of long thin-walled part which was printed vertically - it had little contact area during printing, just a circle with relatively thin walls at the base (on the right on the photo), and no supports:


Also, I was able to repair my soldering iron. Its original nut was made out of ABS and it quickly degraded from heat (became fragile and cracked in multiple places). At first I have tried to replace it with a a nut printed on my FDM printer using high quality ABS filament (very expensive filament comparable by price to this resin), but it degraded even more quickly than original nut (it did not melt, but became fragile and eventually cracked in multiple places, like the original one). But then I printed the nut with Low Viscosity resin:



At the time of writing, almost five months has passed, no signs of degradation at all despite active usage! I was surprised to discover that this resin is actually better than real ABS.

And of course, precision and quality of resin printing is much better - layers are practically invisible, and more importantly strength is uniform in all directions. FDM printed parts always have layers as their weak spot, and break easily, and produce low quality threads. I'm using FDM printers since 2015 and always had issues with them... They never printed high quality parts for me, not even after many upgrades and tuning. Even with 0.2mm nozzle and 0.05mm layers, quality is very bad - small threads barely functional if printed vertically and non-functional otherwise, parts break easily at layer lines, printing speed is very slow even with standard 0.4mm nozzle, large parts often warp even in closed case on PEI bed and careful leveling and temperature calibration, and so on...

On the other hand, after I purchased my first resin printer, I could print right away after very easy leveling and pouring the resin to the vat. Only things I had to tune was to calibrate exposure and bottom layer tolerance compensation (normal layers do not need any tolerance compensation with the right exposure). For complicated parts, manual support placement is important, since currently there is no software capable of good automatic support placement. But supports are very easy to remove, feels sort of just like removing velcro.

> I have the space and the funds to buy both printers, but I don't think I will be printing enough parts to justify having 2 printers and I don't think I want to take the time to become proficient in the use of 2 different printers.  So why should I buy the Saturn or any resin printer?

Resin printers are more recent and produce higher quality parts, so the question should be why would you even consider FDM printers? They still have some pros which resin printers do not have. For example, FDM printer can print multi-color or even multi-material parts, you can buy 1kg of ABS for about $12 (which is about 960ml of material) but resin will cost at least $30-$35 for 1L. There are some other pros as well, but question is, are any of them important to you? If not, there are no reason to buy FDM printer.

If you have sufficient funds, it is better to buy resin printer and ultrasonic bath. Personally I have 19L ultrasonic bath with 290x260x130mm basket (the basket size is the most important, tank size is larger, but actual useful volume is limited by the basket size). I have two resin printer, Voxelab Proxima 6 with Creality firmware and Elegoo Saturn, the bath is large enough for biggest parts I can print. I print mostly functional parts and actively use both resin printers. I still have FDM printer, but rarely use it. Only reason to use it, if I need to produce a part larger than Saturn can print (my FDM printer cannot print multiple colors or materials, so there are no other reason to use it, except perhaps material cost, but the cost is not an issue for me, part quality is more important, so I use resin printers when possible).

Of course, all of above my personal experience. Perhaps there are others who had better experience with FDM printers than resin printers... But often the cause is bad resin or bad resin printer model, or if somebody needed something only FDM printers can do. All good resin printer models are mentioned at the Chitubox website https://www.chitubox.com/en/download/chi...rmwareList  - if some model is not in the list, it may not support CTB file format and therefore lack features. This is why I had to use CREALITY LD-002H firmware on my Voxelab Proxima 6.

Elegoo Saturn is in the list of officially supported printers by Chitubox, so it is a good choice. I have it and I could use it right away without touching its firmware (but I had to make a small small change in the .gcode settings so fans spin when printing like described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ElegooSaturn/co...he_fan_is/).