My son is at 6th form and studying Maths/Science/Design Technology as he would like to become an architect.

 

He has asked for help towards financing one.  I have no idea where to start at what to look at.

 

What are peoples thoughts/experiences?

 

Thanks

Matthew

What is he going to use it for?

What size prints does he want to make?

 

Resin printers do good definition but need a well ventilated room, or fume extraction, and the prints need washing in a solvent and then hardening with UV light. Filament printers normally have larger print areas but do not have such good resolution. There are a great number of different materials for filament printers but some can be very hard to print well.

 

I have had a filament printers for many years. They do, in my experience, need a lot of fettling to keep them in tip top condition and designing objects to print can be very time consuming. They are however very useful for parts that are bespoke or unavailable.

Edited 21 November, 20214 yr by Liger1956
More info

I currently have, low level entry 3d printers just for playing around.

 

Creality 3D LD-002R LCD Resin  and Creality Ender-3 V2 (FDM).

 

I find I get on personally with Resin a lot more, but I think the "useful" stuff really comes from the FDM printer as said above, printing parts etc.

 

FDM is much harder I think to get better prints and requires more patience, things will go wrong, it's trial and error at times.

 

Resin is awesome for miniatures, models etc, which can then be cured, primed, painted etc.

 

I would think, from what you've said, he would be more interested in a FDM printer.

On 21/11/2021 at 13:00, Liger1956 said:

What is he going to use it for?

What size prints does he want to make?

 

Its something that can get him started with being able to design & build scale models, more to aid with his creativity so size isn't overly important at the minute.

 

We've been doing lots of googling and watching youtube and the Creality Ender 3 & v2 get some very good reviews as a starter printer 

The Creality Ender 3 appears to be a reasonable cheap printer from the reviews but I do not have any experience of them. Be aware that 3D printing is very seldom "plug and play" and that some tuning will be necessary to get the best prints which will take time and use filament.

 

Before you buy a printer you may want to investigate the 3D modelling software available to decide which software you are going to use. The learning curve of some of these can be steep but there are a lot of YouTube videos available. I use OpenSCAD which suits the things that I print and the way my brain works, it is a script based language, but I doubt that it would be suitable for "artistic" models.