Electronics > Manufacturing & Assembly

Have 3d printers changed much in the last few years?

<< < (3/4) > >>

wraper:
Yes they did. Bambu lab X1 series came out recently, which made anything else in $1-1.2k and even significantly higher price range look obsolete. It even measures mechanical resonance and compensates for it. So can print extremely fast in very good quality. Also it has an image spaghetti detection, micro lidar and other stuff. Can print in up to 16 materials if additional automated feeding system is purchased. Also they released stripped down P1P with fancy features removed.
As of resin printers, they got faster, more endurable due to monochrome LCD and DLP and much cheaper.

Berni:

--- Quote from: e100 on February 01, 2023, 11:21:35 am ---
--- Quote from: amwales on February 01, 2023, 10:37:23 am ---I paid £300 for a small Elegoo Mars 3Pro, Chinese resin printer on Amazon, I have been stunned by the quality of the prints

--- End quote ---

From a mechanical point of view it looks simpler, and therefore potentially cheaper to manufacture.

Are the liquid resins regarded as hazardous and therefore difficult to ship? Is disposal a problem, or do you just leave it under a UV light to cure then bin it?

--- End quote ---

We have a Photon S as a UV resin printer, but it doesn't see that much use.

Resin doesn't seam hard to get, but it is quite a bit more expensive the filament. The stuff is not that terribly poisonous, but can potentially cause allergic reactions on skin for some people.  The worst part of it is how smelly and messy the stuff is. It can be smelled into the next room and it has a very oily and sticky consistency to it, so once it escapes the containment it spreads to everything trough touch. This means you need a strictly guarded area for handling it, especially since anything you print comes out of the printer covered in resin and needs to be pried off the build platform. It gets easier once you get a tub filled with 1 liter of isopropyl, but still. Also the resin shouldn't be left in the printer for long periods, so you have to keep pouring things around and cleaning stuff. Everything smells of alcohol at that point..etc. To sum it up, it is a messy printer to operate. They are also not immune to print failures. They still need supported overhangs or parts might break off and ruin the whole print.

The detail these printers can do is amazing tho. You can print some ridiculously tiny features in the prints, including thin rods or walls that other printers couldn't even dream of. Layer lines so fine you can't even see them without magnification.

However the mess is only actually worth it if you really do need the fine details. If you don't need it then FDM is way more convenient to use.

wraper:
Also resin printers are not well suited for functional parts. Normal resins are not that expensive in comparison. However it becomes expensive with special resins which are not brittle, and still you will get something not quite  like normal plastics printed by FDM 3D printers. However they are great when you need to make something wide or many small pieces at once. Unlike on FDM printers for print time it only matters how many layers need to be printed as the whole layer is exposed at once.

e100:

--- Quote from: wraper on February 01, 2023, 11:23:11 am ---Yes they did. Bambu lab X1 series came out recently, which made anything else in $1-1.2k and even significantly higher price range look obsolete.

--- End quote ---

I hope it lives up to the performance expectations and spare parts are readily available.
At the moment all the reviews seem to be from people who have been given free pre-release machines thus they say nice things so that they get more free stuff from other manufacturers.

If it actually works as advertised then yes, it's going to shake up the market.
The other manufacturers have seen this coming since at least June 2022 but have remained silent.

wraper:
That Kickstarter was more like a promotion for an item already in production, not to get the funding. So plenty of people already received theirs a few months ago and are quite happy.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page