So yes, most guides will tell you you need to wear a respirator while working with the resin, but personally I find it really depends on the type of resin I’m using. Generally if I’m just filling the vat then starting a print I won’t bother, same if I’m just removing my print from the plate and getting it ready to post process. But if I’m cleaning up and emptying the vat or I have a bunch of prints I’m working to clean and cure I’ll wear my respirator. Gloves are an always though.
A few additional items you’ll want:
a silicon mat to work on to make clean up easier
paint filters an a funnel to strain the leftover resin when you’re done printing and want to store it for later
a plastic putty knife to scrape failed prints from the film (also good for removing your print from the build plate)
high quality isopropyl alcohol (better than 90%, any less and there’s too much water which makes cleaning not work as well). I pick mine up at the local big box home improvement store (Home Depot, Lowe’s, Menards, etc) in gallon cans. Find it in the aisle with cleaning stuff and paint thinners.
you’ll want to put some isopropyl into a bottle just for cleaning your equipment and work area. I use a spray bottle that I also use for cleaning the build plate on my FDM printer.
extra film since you’ll likely scratch yours after a few failed prints
I found it takes some practice to get the prints setup and sliced for good printing, way more than when I later got into FDM printing, expect failed prints. Supports are much more necessary than on FDM prints, but the fact that it’s upside down doesn’t really make a difference since it’s still printing bottom to top, you just need to be careful of islands as you print since it’s all printed a full layer at a time. This also means the only thing that increases print time is height, something that is the full area of the build plate but only 1cm tall will print faster than a 10cm long needle printed straight up and down despite being way more volume. So fill up that build plate with multiple models to save time.
It does require a lot more post processing than FDM, like at least as much work as prepping, slicing, and actually printing. I can take something off my FDM printer and it’s ready to use, I need to account for at least 30-60 mins of work once my resin prints are finished to clean them, cure them in my UV box, remove supports, and then clean up the vat and printer. I tend to batch print for this reason, getting 3-5 sets of items ready to go and then running them back to back over the weekend. This means I only need to clean the printer up once.
You’ll want to print (likely on your FDM printer) an adapter to allow your build plate to be hung at an angle to allow resin to drain into the vat once a print is done. This will waste less resin when you clean.
This is all just off the top of my head and written on mobile, so apologies for and autocorrect mistakes. Feel free to ask for clarification on anything.
So am I understanding correctly that you can leave all the cleaning/curing process for another day? I can print a set of figures and store them somewhere fresh off the plate on monday, and do all the post-processing stuff on friday? Because if that's possible that is pretty great, I had kinda assumed that the curing and cleaning was required immediately.
As long as they stay shielded from UV you probably can, but I wouldn’t leave them for days. I’ll often leave prints running overnight, they finish sometime while I’m sleeping and I’ll hang them on the drip adapter for a few hours once I wake up and then clean and cure them later in the day without issues. I also typically print in the basement where’s there’s no windows or light so no real way for UV to leak in and partially cure the resin. If you’re printing in a room with windows you have more of a chance of sunlight impacting the prints before you wash them so keep that in mind (the orange/yellow covers block the vast majority of UV but aren’t 100% perfect).
For anyone who stopped reading at the headline, it’s because the material they were using didn’t reach the strength requirements of the project (5,000 psi), despite what previous tests had suggested (6,000 to 8,000 psi). With revisions to the material used, they intend to begin working on the second planned house in the spring.
I’m all about the FreeCAD. I was one of the main people answering questions and posting on the FreeCAD reddit before reddit completely died on the 10th of June. Feel free to ask questions here.
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.
I knew about the resin printer, and assumed about the fdm, but technology improves so much so quickly, I was hoping I missed something big (though I assumed I hadn’t lol)
Almost the same situation here. However, my first designs in freeCAD had lots of errors and I experienced lots of crashes and bugs. Didn’t really get into it.
My tool of choice is now OpenSCAD. It does exactly what you are designing - not more, not less.
I might take a look - the learning curve on FreeCAD is pretty steep. Not that I wouldn’t expect any other CAD to be much easier, but I feel there’s a lot of assumed knowledge about concepts that appear to be unique to FreeCAD. Kinda increases the study load, if you catch my drift.
any advice on getting constraints to actually behave? I can’t seem to get it to actually create geometries more complex than a box. (and forget master-sketches. that irritates me.)
Which workbench do you mean? Are you okay with basic sketch/extrude, part design works well enough, but as you say constraints can be a pain. Tbh just assume you’re working with the points for the most part - polylines work fine for slightly more complicated shapes.
My “formal” CAD training was Dassault Systeme’s CATIA V5 training manual, so I tend to default back to that. For basic geometries, use basic polygon shapes/combinations of those, for anything more complex I tend to use a polyline and sketch out a rough shape, then fully constrain to the dimension I need. If the geometry goes all to hell then stop and just use the mouse to grab a point and pull it back to where it should be before you go any further and then constrain it. (My sketches tend to be noisy with constraints just FYI).
Mangojelly’s guides on YouTube will get you pretty far (though he doesn’t constrain as much as I personally would, I suspect this is just because he’s demoing techniques rather than giving best practice at all times. he knows the software/techniques super well and is great at explaining it).
Based on Mango’s recent video there are a ton of enhancements for sketcher constraints on the latest dev branch, so hopefully they’ll be on main soon too.
If it’s assembly constraints, the only assembly workbench I’ve used is assembly3 - it works kind of how you’d expect an assembly workbench to work, but you do need to hold its hand a bit. I’ve gotten into the habit of, import as step, rename part, add to list of parts, use linear translation with the mouse to get the part roughly where it needs to be and then start applying constraints to put it where I want it.
I’ve discovered freecad is great for FEM, though. (well, the best option that doesn’t cost oodles.) Mostly I design…elsewhere and import the meshes for that. I’ll give Mango’s videos a look.
Check out the Adventures in Creation YT (or Piped) channel. He does a very exhaustive set of tutorials from beginner to advanced that is well produced and explained.
Thanks for that. One of the things that really helped me start using F360 was the 3x20min videos made by Lars Christensen. Looking at the channel you’ve just recommended, he appears to have done something very similar. I’ll enjoy working through those. Cheers!
FreeCAD has an OpenSCAD plugin. Personally, I’d stick with FreeCAD regardless of workflow since you can do both in it. It has its quirks, but once you get used to it, it’s great.
While OpenSCAD is amazing, it is limited in some ways. It is also very marmite-like. You either love it or hate it.
For those confused, OpenSCAD is a scripted CAD package. You effectively write code, rather than dragging the mouse around. I personally love it, but I know others who absolutely hate it for the same reasons. It depends a LOT on how you think about problems.
Fellow OpenSCAD user here. I’d recommend it to anyone as a thing to try, but not necessarily as a thing to certainly end up using.
I love how much control it gives you over your designs and how you can use that to make intelligently parametric parts. I’m continuously frustrated by how it expects you to make (or find libraries for) everything from scratch. For example, I’ve recently discovered ClosePoints which is (a) brilliant and (b) makes me wonder why the heck this functionality isn’t built-in or at least in a default library. I’ve also found that using it for anything complicated has forced me to learn how to write better-organized code.
You still have to put in work to learn how to use it. It’s just a different kind of work.
To be clear I’m grateful that AutoDesk provide a free license at all, and it’s an incredible piece of software, but I have a sense of vulnerability while using and honing my skills in it.
No, nope, nope, nope. Abolish this line of thinking right now. Any company that employs the predatory licensing tactics like those AutoDesk uses are not worthy of one single synapse’s worth of your continued thought. Fuck them. Shed not a single tear. They’re not giving you anything; they’re trying to lock you in as a future revenue source. Thus you have nothing to be grateful for, other than the bullet you’ve now dodged. You are Lot. Walk away and don’t look back, lest you turn into a pillar of salt.
I don’t usually get into this sort of Stallman style FOSS rant, but the behavior of the major players in the commercial modeling space – especially AutoDesk and SolidWorks/Dassault – is just exceptionally bullshit. Pandora’s box is already open on the hardware; any fool with thumbs, a credit card, and internet access can either buy or build an actual 3D printer. So instead they’ll do anything to lock the software side of this wonderful technology in their own proprietary, pay-to-subscribe box.
The Topological Naming Problem has been a thorn in the side of FreeCAD users since the dawn of time time, and while some work was put into the 0.2x release to address this (previous versions were even worse) it’s obviously still not perfect. For anyone not comfortable keeping track of forks and splits and unofficial releases, the intent for the Topo Naming fix developed in this release is for it to be incorporated back into the main line release… eventually. Also, even the most recent release of Realthunder’s fork is one major revision behind the main line release, and also has not been updated since the beginning of this year.
Despite all of this, FreeCAD along with all of its quirks and foibles represents an incredibly important bulwark against keeping a critical aspect of our hobby out of the clutches of corporations and other related doers of evil. Stick with it.
It’s not the gouging out that bothers me. It’s the constant looming threat that they’ll take whe whole thing away and all of your work will be locked inside it unless you pay them.
Yeah, but I need my CAD software to work. I’m working using it. I’m not here to be a bulwark against the corporations to gimp myself and not use something better.
No one is asking you to be a bulwark. FreeCAD is doing it for you.
If you have a use for commercial software for commercial purposes, that’s fine. But most of us don’t, and the notion that our access to the software we need exists entirely on the whim of some fucking corporation is not acceptable. One who can easily decide that the hobbyist license tier is gone, or the tier you need now costs 3 times more because reasons, and by the way the file formats are all proprietary so good luck migrating to a new package.
It’s not paying for it that bothers me. It’s being milked for Yet Another Subscription. For sake of argument, I have and heavily use a licensed copy of CorelDraw for 2D vector art, but it’s a version I paid for and I can use it perpetuity. It’s not a subscription; no one can take it away from me. Sure, if I want the latest whiz-bang version I may have to pay for an upgrade license. But I don’t care about that, so I haven’t, and the copy of Corel I bought in 2008 (!) still works just fine. You can’t say that about Fusion 360.
Fusion 360 is amazing in the Getting Shit Done^tm^ department, which is the weak point of FreeCAD. I have managed to steer through the byzantine UI of FreeCAD to create a CAD model, but it needed support by someone who has spent years in that application to get the more complex stuff, and even he didn’t exactly know how to achieve it, and that’s on top of me having participated in a 16 hour workshop on how to use FreeCAD. For Fusion 360, I’ve watched a few 5 minute videos on their official channel and that’s it, everything else I was able to accomplish through just looking at the UI.
I learned Fusion 360 before FreeCAD, so it’s not just that I had prior experience in another similar tool.
I think the basic problem with FreeCAD is that it’s a collection of tool benches written by different people who don’t talk to each other. They have overlapping responsibilities while still having vastly different feature sets and don’t integrate with each other most of the time. So, if you want to create a model, you first have to plan ahead to understand what kind of features it’s going to have, and based on that, you have to decide which collection of tool benches you have to pick. More than once I picked the wrong one in the start and then had to do everything all over again in the different one once I ran into a dead end.
Fusion 360 feels like it was written by a single team with a single vision, and everything fits together.
It took me a few months to save the money for my first printer. I used that time to watch loads of videos about 3D printing. And then I bought a printer kit so I got experience with all the components. By the time I made my first print I felt pretty good about my ability to print and fix common errors. I was still an inexperienced idiot, but I was a lot better off than I might have otherwise been.
If you know how to program, build123d is a FOSS option that isn’t FreeCAD! You can create objects directly from Python code, including fillets and chamfers! I’ve been playing around with it a lot and while there’s definitely a learning curve, it’s pretty powerful! There’s a VS Code addon that allows you to visualize what you’re working on and visually debug as well. I can do a lot of things I couldn’t do in OpenSCAD (which is another easier code cad option).
As someone who has working in CAD for 15 years I can tell you that most users don’t want to program 3D models. All of the top CAD packages are graphical for a reason. We need to build something to be up to par and FreeCAD is also not it.
Ouch!
I like OpenSCAD. I was interested in your solution until I found an example. It’s way too verbose for me. OpenSCAD has its flaws, but it’s simple.
OpenSCAD is definitely easier, and I still like it too. I started learning build123d because I wanted fillets and splines, and because you can reference the properties of an existing object (like height) when making another object. Those have always been big drawbacks of openscad for me.
Wet filament can give popping sounds while extruding, and indirectly cause stringing because of the moisture evaporating in the extruder. This causes filament to ooze out because of the high pressure. But since its a week old it's most likely fine.
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