3D Resin Printer complete beginners guide

If you know absolutely nothing about 3D Resin printing but want to give it a go, then what follows is for you.

Before going further, there's a table that likely appears to the right of this text that lists equipment you'll need in addition to a resin printer. It's better you find out now than after the printer's bought.

Recently a buddy of mine got himself a resin printer and started bombarding me with questions. I've done a lot of videos about 3D printing, but the experience made me realise there were a lot of things I'd taken for granted. So what follows requires absolutely no prior knowledge and, at the end of it, should give you everything you need to know to get you printing confidently on your own.

It's going to be a little disjointed initially, but eventually everything will make sense. So let's crack on.

Which Printer

You may already have a printer, in which case you can ignore this section, but if you haven't, let me just give you some warnings. Resin printing is a horrible sticky, smelly and messy process and it's not for everyone. You don't want it anywhere near children or pets as the resins themselves are quite nasty stuff.

So, if you've never tried resin printing, my advice is don't spend a fortune on it. Begin with a budget printer and see how you go. If you begin with a budget printer and if you like it, in time you can upgrade to something larger maybe. But if you hate it, you can always clean everything up and sell it. That way you'll at least get back some of the money you've spent.

But if you're hell bent on taking up resin printing and prefer to ignore my advice about beginning on a budget, here's a link that will help you decide which printer is ideal for you. Just answer the questions and it should help you wade through the possibilities.

What Equipment Do You Need

It's not just about the printer, there's other things you'll need, and I've listed these is a helpful table at the top of this page.

Resin is nasty sticky stuff you don't want on your skin so you'll need disposable gloves. Usually you get a few free pairs with your printer, but you'll need lots, so get a box.

Typically with your printer you'll get a metal scraper. This is to remove prints from the build plate - don't worry, we'll get to that in a minute.

You'll probably get a plastic scraper or spatula. This is for stirring the resin.

You might get some clippers, but it's rare these days. I'd recommend buying some as they're always needed.

There's paper filters but typically no funnel, so you made need to buy one. When you finished printing, you should empty the resin back into the bottle. Always use one of these filters as small items can break off during printing and if left in your resin, you might end up with a cracked screen.

You'll probably get a flimsy face mask and this is pointless. Throw it away. It achieves nothing. Resins can be very smelly and give off fumes that can give some folks headaches. Ventilation is crucial so have lots of windows open. But if you're really safety minded, you should invest in a respirator. This may seem a little paranoid, but quite honestly there are fumes involved and right now we have no idea if there are any possible long term side effects, so a sensible person would wear a respirator.

Eye protection is another must.

There will be spills, so you'll need plenty of paper towels.

And most resins are not water based and need an alcohol solution to clean them up. The usual choice is IPA (Isopropyl alcohol). Some folks go with Methylated Spirits as it's usually affordable. Personally I favour with this ethanol and in particular this Bioethanol.

Again, buying one bottle of cleaning solution will get you nowhere. I typically buy a case of 12, and if you think that's overboard, wait until the next item.

Resin prints need to be washed and UV dried. You can get away with washing prints in a small jar or maybe with a spay bottle, but you still need to UV cure your finished prints as they can remain tacky and can even crack if not cured. I know folks that have tried nail varnish UV lamps and a box lined with foil, but ideally you want a curing station.

In most cases a curing station typically comes as a washing and curing station, and these do exactly what the name suggests. You don't need to go brand specific. Any sort will do. The only thing you need to take into account is size. Resin printers are typically in 3 sizes, Small or Standard, Medium and Large. You'll need a washing and curing station to match the size of your printer.

If you go with my budget recommendation, then you just need a small one. And anyone will do. Just head over to Amazon, search for the cheapest, as long as the reviews don't slate it, and there's your choice. The washers get filled with your cleaning solution and often take several bottles.

Finally, of course, you'll need resin, but I'm going to come back to that in a moment.

How Does Resin Printing Work?

This seems a bit of a digression, but bear with me, it's important.

Firstly, a bit of terminology about a typical resin printer.

There's the Z Arm. This raises and lowers the Build Plate. The build plate is the object upon which the prints are built, hence its name. There's a screen which projects UV light and this is the heart of any resin printer and the bit everyone gets excited about. On top of this goes a resin tray. This, obviously, holds the resin. Typically it has a clear, thin and flexible plastic liner at the bottom which is usually called a fep or FEP, and sometimes Liner.

Getting back to how it works, it's important to realise that the resin is a liquid which hardens when exposed to Ultraviolet or UV light, specifically on a wavelength of 405 nanometres. Now you don't need to worry about the 405 part as personally I've never come across a 3D printer or a resin that doesn't work on that wavelength, so unless you've got something very unusual and obscure, you'll be fine.

So, resin is poured into the tray. The build plate lowers until it nearly touches the FEP, leaving a tiny gap. The printer projects UV light from the screen, through the FEP and onto the build plate. This causes the resin to harden, sticking to the plate and the FEP. Then the Z Arms raises the build plate a little, tearing the print from the flexible FEP. The build plate lowers once more, again leaving a tiny gap. The screen projects, the resin hardens, the plate raises and slowly a print is produced from hundreds and often thousands of tiny layers of resin, each built on top of the last.

What to Print

When it comes to what to print, you'll need a 3D model file and these typically come in the formats of STL files and sometimes OBJs. There are other formats, but these are the most common.

If you visit a model library like Thingiverse, Printables, Cults 3D, etc, you can usually find lots of 3D models which you can download for free, and that means downloading STL or OBJ files.

Slicer

To convert these files into information that the 3D printer can use to print the model, we need a piece of software called a slicer. In case you hadn't guessed, this takes the model and reduces it to hundreds or thousands of thin layers or slices, so the printer can reproduce them in the way that we've just seen.

Now there are a lot of slicers out there and probably the best known are Lychee and ChituBox. Well I'm going to be a little controversial and recommend you head over to Lychee.co and download their FREE slicer. Ok, everyone has their favourites and Lychee is mine, but trust me this is not about that. This is about getting a complete newbie started as easily as possible.

You will need to register and create an account with Lychee and when using their Free slicer you will have to watch an advertisement, but for what comes next, that's a small price to pay.

Resin

So, coming back to resin, which should you buy? Now this is usually all about personal choice like colour, etc. But for the complete newcomer, I'm going to disagree and say not just yet.

What a newcomer needs is a well known resin that will print easily and doesn't cost a fortune.

Now just because you have an Anycubic printer, for example, it doesn't mean you can't use an Elegoo resin. As long as the resin works on a 405 wavelength, and they pretty much all do, then you'll be fine.

So, to make your selection, head over to amazon. In the search box, type in Anycubic 3D Resin. You'll get a variety of stuff come up, but I'd recommend ignoring all that and looking for a low cost with a popular review level. When you find one, add it to your basket but DO NOT buy this just yet. Now do exactly the same thing, but type in Elegoo 3D Resin. Again, find the best match of reviews and low cost and add a bottle to your basket. Then search again for these resins:

Creality3D Resin
Sunlu 3D Resin
Phrozen 3D Resin

If none of these resins match the brand of your printer, let's say you've got a Uniformation, then by all means run a search for that too, adding the results to your basket but NOT buying anything yet.

Resin Settings

The thing that scares everyone when it comes to resin printing is the slicer settings. These really can be very confusing, so much so that I'm not going to cover them here. And if you know how important these settings are, you're probably already calling me various names and questioning my parentage, but trust me, I'm trying to make life easy for you.

Instead of worrying about settings, I want you to open up your Lychee Slicer, hopefully for the first time.

You'll need to tell it exactly which printer you've got and that's simply a matter of selecting your model from the many that are available.

With that done, you'll need to add settings for your resin options, and that can be brown trousers time for the newcomer. But here's the clever bit… Lychee maintains a Library of Users that have already shared their successful resin settings. So, if we're clever, we can use these shared settings as a way of deciding which resin you should buy.

If I return to my Amazon basket, the first in my list is this Anycubic Standard Grey which is only £14.99 – and grey is actually a great colour for printing. It shows more details than bright colours like yellow or white. But anyway, it's pointless you buying this resin if you don't know the settings. So let's ask the Lychee Slicer.

So where we've added our printer, beneath this we can see Add A New Resin. If we click that, we'll get a list of Community Profiles. All that's needed is to enter the resin you're looking for, in this case Anycubic Standard Grey. Now if we look at the top line, we can see that this particular shared profile has been used by over 500 people and validated by 16 users, so that's a pretty good recommendation that these settings will work well for you.

But let's not do anything just yet. Instead go to your second basket item, in my case Elegoo ABS like resin at just £15.99. Let's feed that into the Community Profile. Now here our top line says 89% success rate with 10 prints, but only one user.

And in case you hadn't guessed, I'd recommend doing this for all the resins in your basket. By doing this you should be able to see which affordable resin will give you good results.

It's no surprise to me that the winner in my case was the Anycubic resin. Typically folks stick with the same brand as their printer. Believe me, you really don't have to, so it's worth looking as these profiles change constantly, but by going through this easy process you can easily find an affordable resin with a suitable profile.

All you then need to do is select it and click Add New Resin.

Now go back to your amazon basket, delete all the ones you don't need and buy the one that's most suitable.

Set Up

Now you have everything you need, all that remains is to make sure your build plate is levelled properly. Again this is extremely important, and it's something I've covered before. As this video is already quite long, I'm not going to cover that here, but do visit this video for instructions on unboxing a printer and, most critically, on levelling the build plate. If the plate isn't levelled properly, you can almost guarantee print failures.

Some budget printers are claiming to be self-levelling these days and the jury is still out on whether or not this is true. There seems to be some evidence to suggest that this relies heavily on the printer being properly levelled before leaving the factory, but I need to see more evidence on this before I draw any conclusions. All I'll say for now is this - levelling is important. Make sure it's done right.

Getting Ready

So you've now got a correctly set up printer, a bottle of resin and a slicer with a profile that will bring everything together.

Unfortunately, something that is very often overlooked and which is again very important is temperature. These resins almost all require an ambient temperature of at least 25C. If they dip lower than that, prints often fail. Personally, I live in the UK and print in my garage. Right now, it's October and a typical temperature in there is 14C, which is well below what's necessary. Some printers now come with heaters but most don't. I've advocated the use of heaters for a few years now and have even made a couple, but most folks will likely find it easiest to buy one and ChituSystems do a nice compact heater that does a great job and generally slides inside most enclosures.

Again this is a very important topic. Even if you live in a warm environment, temperatures can often fall at night and this could lead to failed prints. Please take a look at this video as it will give you more information and a few ideas of how to cope in the cool.

However, lets now assume your resin is a nice warm temperature and you've poured some into your resin tray, ready to go.

What to Print

So what should you print?

You probably already have plans for what you're aiming to do with your resin printer, but right now I would urge you to resist that temptation. Instead head over to a model library and search for Presupported or Support Free models.

Supports are a necessary part of resin printing, but the complete newbie can often run into trouble here. I've got a video dedicated to supports and whilst it's a little dated now, the principles remain true and it's helped a lot of people understand just how, where and why supports are needed, so please check out that video.

But right now, this minute, for your first print, you can print the example model that comes with the printer on the USB stick, which is typically a rook or a geometric shape, or you can gain confidence by printing something that you won't need to worry about supporting.

As the name suggests, support free means a model that will print without any supports at all, like the rook. Presupported means the creator has gone to the trouble of adding supports for you.

If you visit Thingiverse, Printables or Cults 3D and run a search for VogMan, you'll find that I've uploaded a few free presupported and support free models. I would recommend the presupported, like this mini Vogman or these Orcs. Now I get that these might not be your kind of thing, but this is about getting you started in printing. Printing one of these will test your resin, your slicer and your printer. It will also mean you've got to clip away the supports and in some cases assemble parts, all of which are easy, but will give you good experience at handling resin prints.

So for example lets download my Mini VogMan print.

Some libraries shove everything in one folder and you end up downloading a zipped bundle. Here on printables we can choose individual files. Read the file names carefully. This one is for FDM printers. This one is resin, but unsupported. This one is supported, but an Extra Large model, but the bottom one is the supported resin print we want. So I'll download it.

Back To The Slicer

Back in my Slicer, I need to import the model I want to print. This lands neatly in the middle of my build plate. I don't need to add supports and I don't need to add a resin profile as this has already been done. So we can head over to the Export tab. On the Right here, we can see the printer I've added and the Resin profile I've imported. And I'm not going to do anything else other than click Export slices to File.

Lychee will ask where I want to export the file to, and this is typically to the Thumbdrive that came with the printer. You'll likely have to suffer an advertisement at this point, but then Lychee will slice the model into layers and instruct your printer in what it needs to do.

Print

Plug the thumbdrive into your printer, then click Print. Search for the file and sit back and wait for it.

Eventually you'll need to remove the plate from the printer and free the print with the scraper. You'll need to remove the supports with clippers, though some folks just like to pull them off. This can cause a little damage, so I prefer clipping, but after this you'll need to wash the print and cure it. There's no instructions for how long you need to cure, but something small like this I'd cure for 5 minutes, and something big like this I'd probably cure for around 20 minutes.

And that's it. Your good to go.

Print, clean and cure a few things, get covered in sticky resin and discover if the hobby is really for you. Hopefully this video will help you avoid the frustrations and pitfalls associated with profile and levelling issues that cause most newbies to fail.

And once your confidence grows, you can support your own models. You might want to experiment with different resins and even slicers, but by then you'll know that you can print and that with a little time and effort, you'll be able to print with the best of them.

And that ends this epic topic which hopefully takes you from zero knowledge to successful print. I have got other videos that may help, but this one should hopefully get you started on your printing journey with confidence.