Also, has anyone here bought a kit, or built themselves an SLA 3D printer? I see that Prusa just introduced one for a little over a thousand dollars. It’d be nice to have one of those. I’ve got to get my old Prusa i3 MK 2 back to working. Been so busy getting my CNC back up and running.
Do/have you watched the YouTube channel Maker’s Muse? He has talked a bit about resin printers and even reviewed a few. My impression of his opinion on resin printers is unless you have a specific need for one, an ffm/fdm printer should be sufficient.
As @Kyle_Kerr said, unless you need the precision it offers, stick with your MK. The resin in toxic and requires a lot of post-work to clean it and cure it. I just bought a MK3 and was tempted by the SLA, but just couldn’t justify the negatives for the precision I would rarely use.
That’s likely what I’ll do. The precision obviously appealed to me, but, for me, and I haven’t studied the facts is the decrease in print time.
Have you looked at the OpenSLA group? https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/109609533907401814291?cfem=1 I’ve been following people building them for a bit now, and some really impressive work has been done.
That said, SLA just isn’t comparable to FDM. You get finer XY resolution and small feature detail, but SLA materials continue to cure and harden over time, which makes them very brittle and almost useless for structural applications. They’d be fine for miniatures and engineering prototypes, but for useful parts I stick to FDM