How does 3D printing actually work?
In: Technology
There are two major kinds of 3D Printing for home use.
There’s Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) and Stereolithography (SLA) the latter is something also called Resin Printing.
In FDM, you take a spool of plastic wire, and push it through a hot nozzle to melt the wire. The nozzle is mounted on something that can move the nozzle left/right, front/back, and up/down.
It lays down a layer of melted plastic which cools and hardens. They then put a layer on top of that.
SLA has a bunch of liquid that turns solid when UV light is shined on it. They put it in a tank with a transparent bottom. Below that is a big UV light. Between the light is a LCD screen like on your monitor. It blocks the UV light from anywhere they don’t want hardened resin.
So they lower a plate only a tiny bit above the bottom, shine the light until it builds a layer, then move the lower plate up a bit and repeat.
Right now FDM is older technology so most of the kinks got worked out. It’s quite easy to make big things on it. But it relies on things physically moving alot so the quality isn’t as good.
SLA is newer. Big LCD screens that can block uv are expensive so the ones that cost about as much as FDM printers can only print small things. But since it’s just a screen blocking light, it can be very very detailed.
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