Wow...is 3D printing really such a CHALLENGE? | Anycubic Photon Mono
Feb 2, 2021 13:00 · 2028 words · 10 minute read
have you ever wondered how hard it is to start 3d printing on your own well you are not alone you might remember that i painted this mandalorian bust a few months ago and actually this is 3d printed stl from thingiverse now back then i didn’t really have a very positive experience with 3d printing it was too difficult for me too hard to understand and even when i tried it myself it didn’t go all too well that is why this bust is 3d printed from someone else i didn’t do it on my own i was just too afraid to do it but as you can already guess anycubic reached out to me with an offer to test their new 3d printer in a video so here i am testing 3d printing again but this time i’m using resin printer instead of fdm printer so just how hard is it to go from liquid resin to ready to be painted miniature is resin printing actually superior let’s find out by the way as you can see most of you are not subscribed yet so if you haven’t already consider subscribing it’s absolutely free so yeah have you tried 3d printing with fdm printer well i did and let me tell you it wasn’t great what i got here is this ender 3 printer which is relatively cheap i think it cost me around 250 dollars and it’s supposed to be this low-cost printer to get you started with 3d printing with that in mind you cannot really expect to print things with the finest details but maybe you want to use this for terrain pieces just like i did unfortunately i encountered many issues when i was doing it first is the assembly when you get your ender 3 you don’t receive it like this but it is split to like 15 to 20 separate parts and it took me several hours to put it together let me just say that it isn’t as easy as putting together a space marine another thing that bothered me is that during the printing process you are using this filament that you are supposed to leave right here but what happened to me is that it got stuck basically what happened is that the string got tangled somehow and i wasn’t able to print anymore of course this doesn’t happen every time but when it does happen it’s very annoying and the last issue and perhaps the most important one is that you are supposed to measure the distance between the nozzle and the hot bed yourself so before you start printing you take a sheet of paper and drag it between the nozzle and hot bed in all four corners so that you feel a little friction between the paper and the nozzle in my experience this is quite difficult to do properly but advanced and more expensive fdm printers do this themselves anyway but at that point you might ask why should i invest more in fdm printer when i could get the resin one instead for the same price and you would be absolutely correct what i got from anycubic is their photon mono resin printer and when you visit their website it currently costs around 229 which is very similar price tag to ender 3 when i got it now i did not use this 3d printer just yet because i wanted to go through the whole process from unboxing to my ready to be painted miniature with you guys so let’s do this okay guys so we got everything unboxed and now all that is left to do is to assemble the thing and we will use this assembly instruction guide so it’s probably gonna be pretty easy but first nice all right so now we should rise the z axis by 10 millimeters all right take this little thing we should loosen up all these screws just so you know this is the actual printing platform now i didn’t manage to do this by hand so i probably have to use these little things okay so apparently you just push it right here and and voila all right so that was quite easy let’s move on to page two what i am gonna do now is take this sheet of paper and put it like this and apparently if i now press home it will descend automatically so now i shall press this platform down and apparently it’s time to tighten up those little screws here okay so that took me forever but i am no bob the builder okay we are gonna go to tools where is tools oh we are here we will set that to zero welcome to the future apparently we should put this thing right here i guess so apparently now this thing should be ready for printing uh all that is left to do is to get some gloves some mask and of course the file that we are gonna print okay so just before we start with the printing process i just wanna mention a few things the first thing is that when you order your 3d printer you also get this memory card and there is a file uh called test or something like that and you can print that if you don’t have any stl files but since i already have some stls that i want to print myself i will use those instead you can get these stls from thingiverse or myminifactory or someone’s patreon as you might know when you download the files you download them in the format called stl however every printer uses different file format not straight stl so to change the stl to the format that the printer supports you have to use a slicer so first when you insert your memory card this is what you see there are some test files that i don’t really care about at this point but when you open this file you get to the slicer once you install the program you will see this in all its might and glory simply take the stl drag it right here and voila you can do here a bunch of stuff but i’m not gonna really touch anything but i’m gonna multiply my print so simply press ctrl c and then ctrl v and we have this platypus boy three times the question is is this for shadowing for future content subscribe to find out of course you can use this slicer for all of the photon printers but i’m gonna select photon mono and you can see that the default settings have changed then you can simply press this button and it will export it in the file format that we need additionally you will see how much time and resin will it take so get it on your memory card stick it to your printer and you are ready the second thing is that uh you should probably turn on door detection function and that simply means that the printing will go on only if there is the yellow transparent cover over the machine now it’s enabled okay so it was enabled anyway now when you are working with the resin uh i wouldn’t advise to drink this anyway according to instruction guide you should wear a pair of gloves and a mask apparently so that’s what i’m doing right now i’m not sure if you can understand me but hopefully you will see what i’m doing simply pour some resin in there now let it sit for a little while since there are little air bubbles and you don’t want them there of course you should keep it as clean as you can so now everything is ready the resin is inside the files have been sliced so let’s print and now we wait the printing process itself took something under two hours which is super fast at this point i took out the printing platform and put it on some paper towels honestly the prints worked out great so all i had to do is get them off using this scraper and i put the excess resin into a sealed container for later usage and be sure to store that in a dark place right before cleaning my miniatures in wash and cure 2 which i also got from anycubic i cleansed everything that was stained by liquid resin simply going over everything with a paper towel and then rubbing it with ipa is enough to clean my miniatures i have used the mentioned wash and cure 2 which was also filled with ipa just so it was enough to cover my miniatures now if you don’t have a wash and cure 2 you can simply get a container fill it with ipa and wash it there but honestly this bad boy makes it so easy the miniatures were gently put inside the container was sealed and the washing program was set to 10 minutes by the way this this definitely doesn’t sound healthy i think you know the drill you simply wait you can take a few selfies if you wanna and once it is over i took out the miniatures to let them dry before curing them by washing the miniatures you get rid of the residual resin that is still on them but still you have to make them harder so they won’t fall apart easily by exposing them to uv light it is also at this point before curing that you might want to remove supports from your miniatures since it will be easier as it is a little bit softer i have chosen to leave the supports b and set up my wash and cure for turing program nice once the setup was done i decided to put there just one miniature because i was not sure if it’s gonna cure evenly with more than that honestly if you guys put there more than one miniature let me know because i am a noob anyway this is not a big deal since according to the guide it should take just around 2 minutes for such miniature which is just enough time to take more selfies so i repeated this process for every miniature and here are the results i think it worked out just great it’s super precise i think that you can even print display level miniatures when i compare this to the result from the other printer not only is this better quality but also it is way faster printing these three miniatures took just around two hours unfortunately cleaning the resin is not all that fun but other than that there are no downsides as far as i can see honestly i’m not sure what i’m gonna do with my old 3d printer when i have my photon mono because clearly i am not able to print well on that but listen i’m sure that i must be doing something wrong okay either way i am so excited about the possibilities i am even surprised that it went without any issues i sort of expected that it will take more than one try and actually i think it proves how easy it is for you i want to thank anycubic for sponsoring this video if they didn’t contact me i probably wouldn’t give 3d printing a second chance but since they did now i have another tool in my arsenal to paint more exciting miniatures for you guys definitely check out the link to anycubic’s website down in the description because if you want to start with 3d printing and support this channel at the same time now is the chance to do so once again if you like the video consider subscribing and if you want to help others get better at painting and printing miniatures give this video thumbs up so that way youtube guides will know that they should take this video and recommend it to them and as always see you in the next one bye.