Updates to Resin 3d Printing
After doing a bit of printing, I’ve run into a few issues and overcome them and thought it might be good and cool to write some of it down.
Scaling prints up is easier than scaling down. When scaling up, you can normally get away with using the pre-supports included but when scaling down, you MUST support the mini yourself. I’ve found that the automatic supports from Lychee are generally good enough, I’ve only had very rare failed prints (and most of those where my fault for doing something daft) I’ve scaled down some One Page Rules models from 28mm to 15mm and they come out looking really cute and well but they are too fragile for gaming use (I’d include a picture but I have broken all the tiny models). For 15mm gaming I am probably going to use 6mm or 10mm figures scaled up as these handle much better. I intend to get myself a Forest Dragon Army Pack and I will post here when that project is done.
It is a lot easier to take off the supports when the model is not cured. Gloves, eye protection and a mask are 100% ESSENTIAL while doing this. I found that it was easiest to place the uncured model in some warm but not super hot water as this softens the supports, but this also produces a load of contaminated water that you have to dispose of responsibly so I normally just clip the supports offs before I cure the model. I have heard rumours that a heat gun can be really useful but I haven’t got one of those yet.
I experimented with printing resin bases for 15mm models but I’d recommend that you just use 1p coins. For 28mm, it kind of is worth it to print resin bases if you are only doing a small squad (which is what I intend for 28mm figures, they are just too large to print out large armies. I wouldn’t have the storage space for them)
Make sure to buy a funnel in case you ever need to pour the resin back into the bottle. You need to do this if there is a failed print so that you can remove the blob that was meant to be a Chaos Despoiler Lord.
You can add resin while it’s printing, just make sure to pause it first.
Resin 3d printers are much easier to use than 2d paper printers. You wouldn’t expect it but it’s true.