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