At the moment, 3D printers are almost everywhere. School, Hackerspace, Home Workshop, you name it. Most of these machines are of the extruder-filament variant, better known as FDM or fused deposit modeling. Over the past few years, cheap LCD printers have also brought resin printing to many stores. LCD printers, like their DLP and SLA counterparts, use ultraviolet light to cure liquid resin. These machines are often praised for the super-high detail they can achieve, but are Really slow. And messy – liquid resin gets everywhere and sticks to everything.
We are not exactly [Jón Schone] Proper was thinking about printing when he started converting a classic printer to using resin instead of filament, but it said “Can you make FDM printing as messy as LCD printing?”
It turns out you can. His extremely well-documented research process is shown in the video below, and shows his design process, from the initial concept to the almost-kind-working prototype. As you might expect, extracting and laser-curing a high-viscosity liquid at a controlled rate is not an easy task, however. [Jón] Made a fantastic effort. From designing and building his own peristaltic pump to sending a UV laser through a fiber-optic cable, he explored a ton of different ways to make the printer work. While he may not be 100% successful, the video is a great reminder that not all projects go the way we hope. Nonetheless, he is optimistic, and says he has some ideas for refining the design (and welcomes any input from the community). It’s not even the only new and exciting method of resin printing we’ve seen in the last few weeks, so we’re sharing [Jón]Hopefully the FDM resin printer will work (someday, at least).
Thanks [Baldpower] For the tip!