For less than $30K you too can get a 0.025 layer height

Fascinating video by Adam Savage who is a huge fanboy of Bambu Labs. He managed to secure a Formlabs Fuse 1 SLS printer which uses Scintered Nylon for it’s prints.

Let’s just say that Bambu Labs has nothing to worry about. :joy: This is not just 3D printing, this is truly additive manufacturing. I would like to see how long it takes to print a benchy.

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If you need 1 or 2 items printed in Nylon SLS for a special project, you can get it done by companies such as PCBWay.

I got flywheels and an air plunger system (you might call it a air piston & cylinder) for foamsoft (high end “nerf” compatible, i.e. a milsim game with foam dart guns) done a while ago.

The flywheels didn’t work (not balanced properly due to tolerances); darts were deviating as much as 3 centimeters per meter of range, which is not good, and the flywheels produced a very loud siren-like wailing due to imbalances.

However the plunger was fine, and produced a reasonable air seal and consistent performace, flinging foam darts at 75 m/s with a standard deviation of only 3 m/s. I then discovered nylon SLs isn’t as strong as I thought, and managed to break said plunger tube by repeatedly dry-fitrig with a 14 kilogram spring. Aluminium survives that.

EDIT by the way. this layer height is normal for SLA resiin. you can go buy an Elegoo Mars for 200$ and print that. (Well, I actually I never actually tried 0.02 but 0.03, or 30 microns, is working fine for my Warhammer nonsense).

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I’ll just say that an Ender 3 can get 0.04mm layers. Add a 1mm pitch leadscrew, and now its at 0.005. Gear it down, now its at 0.0025mm minimum layer height. But thats at full torque. 0.00125 at half torque. 0.0008333333… at one third torque. Not a bambu printer, but this disproves the title for around $150. (Good luck printing quick enough for the extruder to move :sweat_smile:)

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I run a print shop that does prints for customers and i ran the numbers on a benchy.

It would take about 3 hours in the printer and another 2-4 hours to cool. People may also want to media blast/tumble/dye/polish adding minutes to hours of labor and machine time.

The cost to have this done 3rd party would be about $8 assuming other things are printed as material cost is almost fixed depending on the height meaning 8 benchys will cost me almost the same as 1 and take the same exact amount of time. Lots of other places also charge by the print meaning that it may run a couple hundred for 1 full print.

If layer height and accuracy is what you are trying to achieve resin is superior. The advantage of sls is not having support, large batch production as you can stack parts, as well as material properties that are widely different from resin and fdm.

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