Small 3D Prints. Resin or Filament Printer?

by John

For 2+days I have printed cannon barrels and carriages on a filament 3D printer. The printer, a QIDI X-Max3 has worked very well for machine parts in PLA which is quite strong and tough. But for the small cannon components it has been a struggle. The main problem is that I am an occasional 3D printer and I forget how I solved the same problems last time.

These are 18pr gun barrels printed muzzle down. I could not see what I had done incorrectly, so sent the photo to the AI who/which suggested much slower printer movements.

After this one the AI suggested separating the barrels more widely so cooling would work better between moves.

After several more changes, including re-cleaning the printing plate by washing it in detergent, then dying it and wiping it with isopropyl alcohol, the results were just about acceptable.

Good enough?

Then one of my readers commented that resin printers gave very good results on tiny detailed items.

I have had an Anycubic Mono7 resin printer for a couple of years but was not satisfied with the results on larger items. I found that they distorted very easily, and so had stopped using it.

But after that comment I decided to give it a try on the cannons. The barrels are 40mm long. On the carriage some of the components are sub millimeter in size.

I really was not expecting anything any better than on the FDM printer, but look at what happened….

36 perfect barrels, even the breeching rings.
And 28 perfect carriages!! Including small details which did not survive on the FDM printer. Wow!

A big thankyou to my anonymous reader for his brief and very valuable comment.