Testing 3D Printed Resins: Is Water Washable Better?

grab your number two pencils children it is time for a test and i know you're thinking ah give me a break well a break you shall have many breaks in fact we're gonna file these resin tests away while the other kids play in the sand don't worry you can handle it you're durable now wash your hands with water before we get started while i get your tests printed off today we're going to try and tackle a long-standing question that i get asked pretty often and it's is water washable resin better or worse than normal resin i often use water washable resin but it's for the convenience the answer to the question is i don't know but today we can actually test that because i have three elegumars pro printers and so i can test out three different resins all at the exact same time in the same conditions the resins we'll be testing today are amerilabs amd3 advanced modeling resin it's probably the highest quality commercially available resin that they have as well as elegumar's water washable photopolymer resin and for a comparison or a control their regular abs photopolymer resin in gray this will give us a good baseline to compare all three too because that's the one that normally comes with printers like these now the tests that i'm going to perform on these resins are definitely layman's tests i don't have scientific instruments to test these things properly but i still think i can get some valuable information out of these different resins as i'm pouring these resins into the print vats i'll put the settings that i used in chittu box to print my miniatures on that way if you want to recreate these tests you absolutely could or if you just want to mimic the results i get on miniatures now don't freak out about my toothpick and the resin bats i'm not actually touching the bottom i'm comparing the thickness of the resins the first thing that i noticed was that the amerilabs resin is a little bit thicker than either of the elugu mars resins does this mean anything i don't know but they charge three times as much for the amerilabs resin because it's supposed to be higher quality so maybe thickness equals quality take that as a life lesson the standard abs like gray photopolymer resin from elegumars has a slight blue tint to it and it uses the exact same print settings as the black water washable resin the miniatures that i'm going to be printing today come courtesy of epics and stuff you can actually get the whole pack for 50 off if you're part of my mini factory's mmf plus system which is basically a subscription service that gives you 50 off a ton of different minis and actually even gives you some for free i wanted to be able to show off the minis that i'm going to be printing and say thank you to my mini factory because they sponsor this video and this isn't part of the sponsorship or anything but they do have something cool going on called their christmas community competition if you print off a christmas based mini and paint it right now you can enter it for competition and 10 winners are actually gonna win one of the printers like i have one of the my mini factory elegu mars pros so it's a good opportunity if you can get something printed and painted for christmas you may even win your own printer which would be neato for the holidays back to the actual subject to the video let's get printing on four different minis a dwarf a flaming skull a little mimic book and an actual mimic chest as these things print you're going to notice that the amerilabs amd3 resin prints faster it just has the capabilities to take in uv a little bit better and so you can get faster prints done with this stuff so if speed is a contender amerilabs is going to win out on that aspect of it but whenever i take these off they all look absolutely great they didn't have any problems with the supports i didn't notice anything left over in the resin vats all three of these printed off just fine that could also be a props to the epics and stuff pre supports but hey i think that it all works great and i didn't notice any defects in any of the prints coming off of the trays now we come to the only major difference in how you have to handle these resin prints after they come off the printer and that's post curing the two gray resins that we're post curing are not water soluble you have to get the excess resin and all the impurities off of those prints using alcohol now you can keep vats of that stuff but it can go bad so you often have to buy more alcohol i had to buy a gallon of this stuff and it's not cheap especially in 2020 when everybody is trying to get isopropyl alcohol there are other products that you can use besides isopropyl alcohol but it still means you have to buy something on top of the resin to handle this stuff properly water washable doesn't have that problem because you can just use water straight out of the tap and by comparison it's essentially free i'm not going to go down to the quarters of a pennies that you need to compare the price to it's essentially free compared to having to buy a whole separate product now whenever you get these prints off of the bed you've got to slosh them around in the alcohol to get any excess resin off of them so that you have nice smooth prints every time you want to post cure prints like this you have to do this you can dunk them in alcohol and then a little bit of water and then maybe even more alcohol but you have to do a lot to these things and then let them sit out before you can start curing them with water washable resin i can just take my little uv curing bucket that i have out here and spray it with the garden hose this bucket is used for nothing but water washable prints because i can hit it hard with a garden hose here and get all of the excess resin on these prints and on my print tray off at the exact same time then i just leave the water in this little bucket sitting out until the water evaporates out in the sun then i don't have to worry about disposing of all of this like you do with alcohol because you have to be able to get rid of that in a safe and clean way then when i'm done in my backyard all i gotta do is go inside and take these prints and scrape them off of the build tray and then if i have any excess resin on there i can scrape that off too and clean it with water if i'm using the other resins i have to clean everything with alcohol when i'm done and again you've still got to take all of these things and wash the alcohol and figure out a way to dispose of that alcohol when it comes to taking prints off of their supports they all performed exactly the same which by the way if any mini maker uses holo minis or holo mini bases they always break please don't do that i hate when that happens but either way they all printed out just fine and they came off of their supports with no problems i didn't notice any difference between any of the three types of resins they're all fantastic after taking all these minis off their supports let's take a look at the befores of all four types we have ourselves a regular chest mimic we have ourselves a barbarian dwarf with a giant axe we have a flaming skull with magical fire and we have ourselves a very tiny book mimic ignore any of the white fuzz you see on the black resin i was touching them up with some tissue and it kind of sticks to resin like that which it's not going to matter that's the least of their problems we are going to absolutely brutalize these minis but first let's take a look at the quality first up is the high quality amerilabs resin printed mini you can see on his back muscles here this resin prints as smooth as eggs you can only see very very tiny build lines and remember i'm shooting in 4k and i'm like an inch away from these minis so even the tiny build lines that you do see are pretty exaggerated if i hold him just right with the light you can kind of see an almost topographical map of all of his build lines comparing that directly to the water washable resin there are noticeably more build lines it could be that there's more exposure needed for this material because it takes longer to print that you're able to see the lines a little bit more clearly defined his back is not quite as smooth as the other one and whenever i hold it up here to the light you can see again with that kind of topographical style you can just see more build lines than you could with the ameralabs resin comparing directly to the other ellugu mars resin you can see about as much build lines on this material as you could on the water washable resin they had the same exact print setting so that kind of makes sense overall this resin looks like it has more build lines than the others but i think that's a consequence of the gray color you can see when i show all three back to back only the two elegu mars ones actually do have more distinguishable build lines now we're at the part where not having any scientific instruments is gonna make the rest of this video pretty subjective because i'm gonna break these minis but i don't have anything that can give me an exact amount of force it took to break pieces of this many off i can only tell you by comparison how much harder it was to break this type of resin versus another so starting off with the amerilabs resin i'm going to break this ax head off on this dwarf and kind of judge compared to the other residents how hard it was to break that was decently hard i was actually kind of surprised at how much effort i had to expend but comparing to the water washable resin i found the water washable resin to be only slightly easier to break while the regular elugu mars resin fared about as well as the water washable resin to me when breaking off smaller pieces like the tongues of these book mimics i noticed no discernible difference between any of the three resins it took very little effort at all to break all three of them off i was planning on comparing really thick pieces to break off like i have the axe head and the small little book mimic but it turns out these are hollow inside so instead i was doing a comparison of hollow pieces which by the way again hate hollow pieces you can see a bunch of uncured resin on the inside there and i don't know what that's doing so i would rather it just be completely solidified but i did notice a large difference when breaking off these flaming skulls in this hollow scenario both the water washable and regular resin actually fared far better they were way harder to break and maybe that has to do with the exposure times then i wanted to take the chest mimics and compare how hard it was to sand or file down this material i did 10 strokes back and forth on the corner of my metal file followed immediately by 10 strokes back and forth with the flat side of my metal file to get an accurate comparison between all three now the interesting part about this was actually that the amera labs and the other gray regular resin were very similar to each other the black water washable maybe because it's known to be more brittle filed away a lot faster and it left a lot of little cuts on the end of it that the others didn't normally get so i probably won't actually use water washable for dice because i have to sand those a lot and i don't ever want to find myself lacking a material because the sandpaper or zona papers took away too much i then also tried to scratch the material with its own resin prints with the axe heads that i broke off and it looked like it was doing a lot of damage but it was all pretty much superficial and there wasn't really any difference between the three prints on how much it took away after you wiped it off there was no real damage done to any of the prints now let's move on to the more destructive tests i'm gonna take each of the barbarian dwarf miniatures and hold them three feet above my table to mimic them being knocked off of a table while you're playing dungeons and dragons or a tabletop game no damage was done to them whatsoever and that was disappointing so i decided to break out the hammer at this point i just wanted to see how much effort it would take to break one of these minis so i held these hammers up at a constant angle four inches above each mini and dropped it down i didn't add any force i just dropped the hammers down onto each mini to see what would break there was no damage done to these mimic chests even though they were hollow prints so well done epics and stuff you make very very well made minis here and so i tried to do it from a completely upright hammer just letting it fall on the minis exact same thing happened i did not notice any marks on these minis from this hammer i was starting to get concerned and so i figured you know what maybe these chests are just too thick let's bring it back to the dwarf barbarians again from a full hammer height drop i had no breaks you can actually hear i was starting to laugh at the whole process okay i finally had my first break and it was from the regular elegu mars resin now i'm not gonna say that wow that's a definitive test and that this resin is actively worse but i don't know it was the first one to break if a hammer fell on it in the exact same spot so i guess it's technically worse but it's nothing that you're ever going to encounter if you're dropping books or hammers on minis even regular non-3d printed ones are gonna break that's just tough try not to do that so hitting things with a hammer aside what can i actually say that i learned from all of this well one i would say i wouldn't use water washable resin for things that i needed to sand like creating masters that you're going to recreate with actual tabletop resin later i would instead use alcohol resins like the ameralabs or the regular elegu mars resin however i would totally prefer water washable resin for miniatures but that's because convenience is the most important thing to me if i were to say would amer labs be worth it i would honestly say no high quality resins aren't that worth it if you're an average hobbyist however if you're a youtuber or somebody who takes close-up pictures of their prints or honestly if you're a 3d printer who sells things i would definitely invest in the high quality resin because you get some really really nice smooth prints and they're faster than normal but for the average person you don't need to spend the extra money on it it's the cadillac of resin prints for a reason the average person just doesn't need a cadillac thank you so much for watching i hope that you learned something or at the very least were entertained by a grown man hitting a tiny miniature with a hammer over and over i found that a lot of fun this video came as a result of questions that you've asked in the comments for me to try is experiments so if you have any other thoughts or questions send them down below i probably don't have the answer to them offhand but i'm always willing to try and learn new things and then share that information with you consider subscribing if you might want to see more videos like this in the future or if you want to learn how to make your own dice from scratch because i do a lot of that like the video if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it and i hope that you have a fantastic day

Channel: Rybonator

Views: 133,456

Keywords: 3d printing, tabletop, minis, 3d printed, 3d, print, dnd, dungeons and dragons, myminifactory, elegoo, mars, pro, resin, dlp, sla, fdm, challenge, ttrpg, models, dice, modular, rybonator, dice goblin, how to make dice, resin miniatures, supports, timelapse, cure, curing, station, how to, settings, chitubox, miniatures, 3d printing miniatures, 3d printed miniatures for dnd, d&d, sanding, files, bundle, printer, 3d print dice, epics n stuff, epic, stuff, dwarf, mimic, water washable, ameralabs, test, hammer, review, disposal

Id: IojbZlLptsM

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020