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RE: Is owning a 3D printer worthwhile

Hi
I would be both of ours are from China although that may not be correct.
I have these at my shop but they are looking at one made by form-labs at work that is about 3 times faster than ours but much more expensive too.

To be clear, there are two main approaches, the extrusion printers are cheaper and work by having a spool of plastic that is extruded and applied at about the diameter of a hair, and the x,y z motion builds up the object. We started with those BUT if one wanted a solid object like a horn, they take forever. Instead those objects generally have a hollow interior or one filled with supports. Speed is directly tied to the volume of plastic you print.

The resin printers can print a solid block at about the same rate at a small object, here is the fixed height per hour they can print. For anything big, these are WAY faster but still, an object that is say 10 inches tall, might take 15-25 hours to print. That railroad bogie (as in Europe) took about 5 hours and is printed as solids if the object was solid.

These work by having UV lights that shine up through an LCD screen into a vat of goo sitting on it, that has a clear plastic bottom. The UV light triggers a VERY thin layer of to turn solid. The LCD screen only lets light through where it was supposed to print. Then at about 1/3 mm per set it grows the object on the bottom of a metal plate which slowly lifts out of the goo.

The two resin printers we use in the lab are an Elegoo Saturn and the one mostly used (and printed that truck) is the Sonic Mega 8K-S. There is a new version of that one that is supposed to be twice as fast but more than twice the coins.

There are two more steps to resin printing too, first you have to wash the goo of the part (usually with rubbing alcohol, some resins use water)
and then curing with UV light. We use the curing box that came with the Elegoo and with that one, it takes 5 min to finish the cure.

Hope that helps.

There is an amazing amount of printable 3d cad models out there, HIGHLY likely you can find cool fighter plane stuff.

Look for files that end with .stl
Have fun!

Tom



Edits: 05/10/25
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