Phrozen Sonic Mini 8K S

Car 54

Car 54

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So I finally repaired my printer..I had spilled resin down the side and took it apart to clean it out. Instead of taking it apart from the bottom (I now know better) I took the top off and in putting it back together, crimped the MOBO to LCD screen ribbon cable. Phrozen was good about making sure that's what I needed, and all in all it took about 1 month to get the new ribbon in. Then I lost interest in putting it back together until this weekend.

So here are my results, right out of the box, with no tweaking, but just using the Chitubox settings for the Phrozen resin.

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rkm rdt

rkm rdt

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Nice catch, Charlton :) Thanks :)
It’s fun printing other stuff along with a few arches
charlton heston old hollywood GIF
 
Toothman19

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I've had mine sitting in a box for a month. Waiting on the ferguson mini plate before I get it ready to print. Looks great though!
 
Affinity

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What phrozen resin are you using? Ive got a 4k and Ive been using envisiontec liquid, I need to order some of the phrozen.
 
Car 54

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What phrozen resin are you using? Ive got a 4k and Ive been using envisiontec liquid, I need to order some of the phrozen.
Aqua-Gray 8K. The photo of the occlusal view was with Aqua Snow-Gray 8K (the straight gray was too reflective with my camera).
 
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tuyere

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Phrozen's resins are "fine" for hobby stuff and basic model printing, but I recommend branching out to a dedicated resin company- selling resin is just a value-add for Phrozen, it's not what they're really about and are just selling someone else's generic product as-is with a healthy markup, but there are people whose whole thing is developing new resin formulations for all kinds of specialized applications.
Siraya Tech is my go-to for LCD resins, they have a wide product range including engineering-geared resins at non-engineering price points, and it's all great-quality stuff, with extensive support from the manufacturer. They make a very popular product called Tenacious that is typically blended into other resins to make them more resistant to breakage without compromising on print detail, lots of people blend 5-20% Tenacious into other products to dramatically reduce the breakages you get from dropped parts, for example. They offer two different castable waxes, each tailored to different types of casting (thin sections vs heavier sections),etc-
Some other neat products they have:
  • I'm extremely fond of their Sculpt and Sculpt Ultra resins, fantastic surface detail and hardness while still being easy to print and reasonably cheap. Sculpt Ultra is also the only reasonably-priced high-temperature LCD resin I know of, it's formulated for directly-printed injection mold tooling, but I used it extensively to print reusable multi-part molds for low-temperature eutectic alloy metal casting (mostly lead-free tin-bismuth alloys as a good-looking pewter substitute).
  • Mecha, intended for mechanical assemblies, gear trains, etc- the surface burnishes to a hard and smooth facing instead of grinding away into powder, so you can make low-friction precision mechanical assemblies with better service life than you'll get with basically any other hobbyist-priced resin.
  • Build, an all-purpose engineering resin that is specifically blended for easy drilling + cutting of threads with a tap and die, so it's great for situations where you want to bolt parts together and be able to disassemble it later, for making drill jigs, for parts with precise holes that you will model undersize and then ream to final spec, etc
They've also got a glow-in-the-dark resin, an optically-clear resin you can print lenses with, an SLA resin, etc etc- and their generic modelling resin, Fast, is great too. But the weird niche resins are a lot more interesting, and kinda showcase the work they put into making good products.
 
Car 54

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Thank you for your post, @tuyere. I'll check Siraya Tech after I get more prints under my belt, to be able to compare and understand things better. I will only be doing printed models for now.

Maybe this company has been mentioned here before, but I haven't been paying close enough attention to the details of posts like I will be now :) It looks like an interesting website. Are their resins any good?

 
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Car 54

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How often do I need to print the 20mm cube or other print objects to verify the calibration for lab models?
 
Affinity

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Tuyere, Have you tried the plant based resin? Im looking at the site now too. What do you use for models?
 
mightymouse

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On a side note just checked PAC-Dent website and they finally validated the Sonic 4K and 8K for Denture Base 2.0. Can’t tell you how long I’ve been waiting on this. So now we finally have a sub $400 printer to shove in the $10,000+ printers face for printing FDA approved denture resins. PAC-Dent already had their crown resin validated but the denture base was my wishlist item for my Phrozen 4K mini. Happy Printing.
 
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tuyere

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How often do I need to print the 20mm cube or other print objects to verify the calibration for lab models?
Definitely any time you disassemble the machine, drop the build plate/jar the printer, or are trying a new resin; beyond that, it's up to you, and how proactive you want to be. I would just set a schedule and stick to it so you can gauge the scope of any issues that you detect after the fact; i.e. if you do it every monday and you suddenly get a weird result, you know the issue can't impact cases printed more than a week ago.
Personally, we run at least one "standard battery" of cube + city for all of our printers every monday under normal conditions; if I'm suspect of a printer's condition, I'll run it at least once a day, possibly including one cube in every build if the parts are important or particularly dimension-critical.
Remember you don't need to necessarily run a 20mm cube as a 20mm cube; you can change the scale factor of a single part to save on material and print time. 0.75 factor gets you 15mm, 0.5 gets you 10mm, etc. Wouldn't go any smaller than 10mm, bigger cal cubes give more reliable feedback.
Tuyere, Have you tried the plant based resin? Im looking at the site now too. What do you use for models?
Easy doesn't really have a strong case for general use unless you're new to things and want to make nesting less challenging for yourself, imo. Easy to print and easy to clean up, but the material isn't really noteworthy or impressive otherwise. It's comparable to a generic entry-level hobbyist resin from Phrozen or similar, it's very forgiving. Some people do use it as their main resin- not for dental parts, just general printing- but imo if you're having issues getting successful prints, you should address that with experimentation and research, not compromising on the material.
RE: the plant-based aspect, anything eco-appealing with resin is more or less greenwashing, none of this stuff is recyclable or biodegradable after it's been cured, the process is inherently lousy for the environment and very wasteful. I don't love it, but it is what it is.
For general model-printing, Fast is their mainstay. It's a nice all-rounder and you can really lay down layers fast without running into delamination issues, hence the name.
Sculpt Grey would be my preference for very high-detail, precise models, like anything with dies; it's exceptionally dimensionally stable after printing, holds detail very well, and is reasonably-durable and straightforward to print. Has a lot of filler so it's not so easy as Fast. Sculpt Ultra is even nicer to work with but it has about as much filler as you can possibly cram into a resin so it needs slow print speeds with lots of dwell time so the super-viscous resin can flow where it needs to.


All that being said, I don't use ST for any dental printing, strictly because we run all DLP printers here, nothing LCD. The light intensity of DLP printing is a lot higher so the formulations fundamentally differ (there's more photoinitiator in LCD resins to compensate) and you can't just swap them between processes, LCD resins will badly overexpose with DLP printing and there are no established settings to use. They do make a DLP/SLA-compatible resin called Form that I do use for tools and functional parts around the lab, but it's not popular and you have to figure a lot of it out for your specific printer, so it probably isn't worth it for most DLP/SLA printing folks.
 
bigj1972

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Thank you for your post, @tuyere. I'll check Siraya Tech after I get more prints under my belt, to be able to compare and understand things better. I will only be doing printed models for now.

Maybe this company has been mentioned here before, but I haven't been paying close enough attention to the details of posts like I will be now :) It looks like an interesting website. Are their resins any good?

They're commonly known in the printer world. At least 4 years ago they were somewhat innovative. But a lot has changed since then in the availability of resins. Everybody now says their stuff is the best but actually just watch some YouTube videos where they tested Siraya against other resins and strength / flexibility etc. they're pretty much all the same except some have different flexural properties or softness.

Nothing groundbreaking but good. I printed a replacement key fob out of Tenacious and Blu.... It was stronger than your regular Phozen resin...... But still, it cracked and failed. After printing about half a dozen key fobs with different resins, just bought a plain plastic key fob off Amazon for $8.... 10 times stronger than 3D resin.
 
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tuyere

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Nothing groundbreaking but good. I printed a replacement key fob out of Tenacious and Blu.... It was stronger than your regular Phozen resin...... But still, it cracked and failed. After printing about half a dozen key fobs with different resins, just bought a plain plastic key fob off Amazon for $8.... 10 times stronger than 3D resin.
This is kinda the thing with resin parts, there's a pretty hard cap on the mechanical performance you can expect, you find you have to temper your expectations a bit if you're comparing parts to injection-molded plastic or whatever. It's inherent to the process, it's a spongey lattice of polymer-oligomers with a ton of inert photoinitiator embedded in it, doing nothing for you. FDM printing is much better for functional stuff that doesn't need very fine detail, if you're making a lot of "lab accessories" an FDM printer will pay for itself pretty quickly.
 
bigj1972

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3D resin comparison, it's like testing which is stronger, a graham cracker vs saltine. They might have a graph with the results, but you're not going to get very far scraping snow off your windshield with either one.

Yet instead of buying fancy equipment or wasting hours upon hours printing.... You can just go to Walmart and buy a snow scraper for $4.
 

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