After a couple of months without uploads, I came back with a resin I really liked: NOVA3D's Red Wax-Like. It printed beautifully on standard settings, it was cheap, and it's probably the best consumer resin I'd tried so far.
Back after a busy summer
This video came out right before Halloween 2022, after two months of silence. Between work and kids it had been a crazy period, and I had lasers, resins, filaments and printers waiting to be reviewed. NOVA3D sent me this resin to test, and I've used their resins for a long time.
Easy to print, great detail
NOVA3D markets Red Wax-Like as great for jewellery casting as well as for printing, and I tested it for printing. The best thing is that it worked perfectly with the standard settings in NOVA3D's slicer on my Elfin 2 Mono SE. I didn't tune anything. The colour is more of a salmon pink than red, and the detail is excellent. A printer is only as good as the resin you put in it.
I remember being afraid to touch exposure times in my first couple of years of 3D printing, so I can relate to beginners. That's why I think this resin is a winner for them. It's not the best resin out there, since some resins cost ten times as much for a reason, but at under 40 euros per kilogram at the time, it's probably the best consumer resin I'd tried.
About the "wax-like" part: it only looks very slightly like wax. The suggestion is not to go below 0.05 mm layers, while I usually print at 0.03 mm, so it also means faster prints.
What I printed
- A Nightmare Before Christmas figure: all the details were there. But it was my third attempt, because my kids dropped it and it broke. Very thin parts tend to break if they fall.
- Two Rick and Morty sets from Cults: really smooth, with all the details, and roughly 10–15% less print time than with other resins.
- A Prusa resin test cube from Printables, a real stress test, printed at 0.03 mm without changing any setting. It held up really well.
- A solid, self-standing Halloween ghost with a silky, almost textile look, which may be the wax effect. My kids couldn't wait to paint it.
Some instructions suggest warming the resin first to make it more fluid. I didn't: it was still warm in Italy in October, around 22–23 °C in the room, and it worked fine. I was still waiting for my wash and cure station, so I cleaned prints in an IKEA salad spinner. Not ideal, but it works!