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My minions are assembled, awaiting their orders...
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Two years ago, Jack told me he wanted to try 3D printing. He had
found a fairly inexpensive starter printer that he was looking into - It was a
Tronxy filament printer, cost less than $150.00, and seemed like a decent
machine to get a feel for the hobby.
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Baby Groot tax paid...
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While
it was a nice printer for getting our feet wet, it could be… temperamental.
The first really good print we got from it was a Baby Groot planter that Jack
found on Thingiverse. There were a lot of fails, a lot of frustration, and
eventually the Tronxy was left to gather dust in the work shed.
Then we discovered
3D resin printing and purchased our first resin printer, the Elegoo Mars Pro 2
(That’s the red one on the far right bottom row). We were amazed at the detail
that this little machine could get compared to our experience with PLA. Resin printers
are like potato chips or cats – you can’t eat just one (or have just one in the
case of cats). So we bought our first
Phrozen Sonic Mini 4k with plans to start printing miniatures. We had joined a
few Patreons at the merchant level, set-up the Etsy shop, Facebook, Instagram (yeah,
I keep forgetting we have one of those), and waited for our first sale.
Now our house used
to be an over/under duplex. When we bought it, they just opened up the wall to
allow access to the staircase from the downstairs. But they never removed the upstairs apartment
kitchen – and neither did we. We had planned to - just hadn’t gotten a round to
it. As it turned out, that upstairs kitchen made the perfect room for a resin
lab. The old counter and cabinets were still
there, the sink, and plenty of GFCI outlets to plug power strips and machines into.
As we acquired more
printers to keep up with demand, we eventually removed one of the shelves from
the upper cabinets to fit a second row of Sonic Mini 4ks. The plan is to
enclose all of the Mini 4k’s behind plexiglass sliding doors. The Sonic Mighty
4ks will one day be moved to the bottom cabinets along with the Elegoo. Right
now we have all our shipping supplies stored under the printers, but hope to
convert an area of another room to the packing/shipping station.
Our resin lab also
has a nice big steel shelving rack that holds our trays for drying freshly
washed prints and a couple other machines that I’m saving for a later entry to
unveil (wink wink). Yes, those are plastic lunch trays holding the prints. Before we got the idea to use them, we were separating orders out on paper towels all over the counter!
We also have a workspace counter on the other side of the
room for cleaning and prepping prints. Part of that upper cabinet has been
converted into a large UV curing box. To help avoid rinsing uncured resin down
the drain, we purchased a 10 liter sonic parts washer - Very handy thing to
have, but sometimes I get flashbacks to my tour of duty at McDonald’s when I
pull the basket out to drain…
So that's a little peek into our resin lab to kick off this blog. I'm excited to be back on Blogger - And glad you took the time to come check us out. Now back to working on orders...
Have fun storming the castle!
Melissa
