"FDM future?" Topic

"For my birthday, my family gave me a Bambu Lab A1 Mini, and I've really enjoyed making stuff over the last month. It's remarkably idiot-proof—and trust me, I've tried. It's an FDM (filament) printer, and I've mainly been focused on terrain. Thankfully, the technical hiccups haven't been nearly as severe as I dreaded.
I've also printed a few figures; they're serviceable—honestly better than the metal miniatures I bought back in the '70s and early '80s. While I know a finer nozzle would sharpen the detail, I suspect engineers are already perfecting the next generation of extruders and high-speed tech.
I think FDM will eventually make resin printers obsolete. While resin currently offers superior detail, it's a hassle: it's toxic to breathe, dangerous on the skin, and the results are often brittle. Given the trajectory of the tech, is there any reason to think FDM quality and speed won't eventually close the gap?"

Had mine about a year now. I love it and i've printed a ton of terrain with it. Look into Modi Boxi for some storage / transport

You're goig to have fun

That said, I also have 2 resin printers and it's going to be a long time before FDM get's the same quality of detail. We won't even get into how long it takes to print. With a .02 nozzle, and your settings dialed to best quality, it can take 6+ hours to print a single 28/32mm miniature. It took 60 hours fo rme to print 10 minis and that's inteh same print job. In resin, it might take 6 hours to print, but if i print 10 or even 20 inteh same run, it's still just 6 hours

Both have advantages and disadvantages over the other

Yeah, I too love my A1 Mini. I print all sorts of stuff, terrain, vehicles, minis….

I print the minis with the .2 nozzle and yes, they can take a while. But the nozzle only cost like $12 USD-14, get yourself one. Lots of free .stl files out there.

Download and experiment…..and check out Fat Dragon Games. Tom creates files that need no supports and look great!

Dave

Given the trajectory of the tech, is there any reason to think FDM quality and speed won't eventually close the gap?

Yes, there's one.

If resin printing didn't exist there might be more pressure on the FDM manufacturers to improve FDM printers and slicers so that better miniatures were easy to produce. But since most manufacturers make both kinds and a lot of people are willing to accept the hassle of resin printing, what is the incentive to do the work to close that gap? I don't think there is one.

A couple of important notes:

1) some people don't need perfect miniatures, and they have been printing fantasy figures on FDM printers happy for at least six or seven years. I saved a few links to fairly good minis way back then. If your needs are modest the gap is already close. The other side of that coin is that some people will never accept an FDM mini, so there's that.

2) similarly, if you are printing tanks and certain types of ships FDM is pretty good. Aircraft seem to be universally terrible, and of course figures don't work well in FDM. But certain types of minis, including a lot of terrain, is already fine in FDM.

3) ABS can be smoothed with acetone fumes. I have watched videos, I have never tried it. But I have seen the results in person, they're amazing. They may destroy too much detail for you, or not. But FDM with ABS followed by carefully dialed in acetone post-processing is a method by which the gap is already closed, for some.

FDM is easy to get a half-way decent solution. But if you're looking for truly high quality prints, there's just as many or more fiddly details than resin (ambient temperatures, humidity, filament age and degradation, extrusion rates, etc), and that's without getting into the fundamental limitation that an extruder can only be one place at a time, compared to full plate exposure for SLA/DLP style printing. There's only so much physics you can mitigate for before hitting material and structural limitations trying to accelerate the extruder and it's supporting elements faster and more precisely, and nozzles that are pushing molten materials can only get so small before running into limitations of heating and flow rate. We haven't hit those limits quite yet, but we're a lot closer to them than we are to the limits on other 3d printing tech.

I think it is far more likely that a future materials engineer will crack the code that will produce tougher and less toxic resins which are not (so) bad to live with. The problems of toxicity, voc odors, and cleanup are well documented at this point and eventually someone will figure out some better mix of chemicals.

Alternately, some of the other processes which are currently only used in industrial settings will come to prosumer and then consumer level spaces. I think SLS/SLM or something derived from these is probably the most likely. You get most of the same benefits of liquid resins, in a medium (powder) that's arguably easier to deal with. Or maybe something entirely new like a binary material system, where liquid resin components that are individually much less hazardous are mixed and fused in a fashion similar to inkjet printing with epoxy. Spray a little jet of component A and a little component B and then zap it with laser to heat cure it instantly…

The resin technology is also advancing so it may always have an advantage.

We are starting to see fans, filters, vat heating and resin systems. The end stage is likely: unbox, screw the resin tube system to your bottle and press play.

How to take care of failed prints needs some work but self cleaning would be great