After getting frustrated with some mechanical issues in my FDM printer lately, and realizing that most of what I do with it are jobs probably more appropriate for a resin printer, I impulse ordered a cheap resin printer just to try if they are a better fit for me.
I have read that you need to be a bit more careful with a resin printer in certain aspects. I haven't informed myself much about it yet, but from what I understand:
1 - You really don't want to be in the same room while printing, and it should be in a room with a window open or in a balcony or something similar.
2 - Always wear gloves and a mask when dealing with the material or the prints.
3 - You don't want the sun to ever hit the material for long until you have completed the print.
4 - Optionally you can get a curing machine that does a "second pass" of light, if you don't get this you should expect prints to be somewhat "gooey" and less defined.
5 - Always clean the prints with alcohol and scrub them with some sort of brush to get residues off. This would come after the last past of curing.
6 - The prints are done "upside down" and you should set your supports accordingly.
Is there anything else I'm missing? Is any of that wrong, or are there any caveats about it? I would greatly appreciate any info about the particularities, and also any stories and experiences that you wanna share about resin printing.
Thanks!
Don't have a resin printer myself, but there's one more tip that can save you some money in the long run.
As already mentioned by others, you should use pure IPA (ideally the 99% variant) for cleaning your prints, but that stuff can get quite expensive. To keep your IPA "waste" to a minimum you ideally have 2+ containers that you can seal airtight and that are big enough so your build plate + attached prints fit in.
Container #1 is your "pre-wash" for everything right off the printer. It will pick up most of the uncured resin and due to that discolor pretty quickly, but that doesn't matter much.
Container #2(+) is/are your final wash before curing, since you already removed most of the uncured resin in #1 they stay clean a lot longer and you don't have to replace the IPA that often.
Oh, and about your point #4: AFAIK curing is not optional but pretty much required since the amount of UV light the printer itself uses is by far not enough to fully cure/harden the resin. But you don't have to use one of those expensive "curing stations", I've seen more than enough folks who built DIY versions with UV LED strips, tinfoil and sometimes a (DIY) turntable.
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