I have recently obtained a friend’s old Formlabs Form 2 SLA printer. I I am an absolute beginner to printing, but I am pretty excited to get into it.

However, the only place that I would realistically be able to put it is on my desk in my bedroom. From everything I’ve read, I need a better ventilated space with more tolerance for a mess than I could possibly provide.

I think that the right call is to just sell it and save up for some FDM printer, but at the end of the day, I have the SLA printer in hand.

I am asking whether these concerns about resin printers are really that bad and if I am actually fine to start learning printing with what I have in my bedroom.

  • AliasVortex@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    2 months ago

    Chiming in to say that you absolutely don’t want that in your bedroom. Not sure how ubiquitous the experience is, but if you’re ever done a titration experiment in a chemistry class (the one where you add one solution into another a couple drops at a time), your body’s response to being exposed to resin fumes (as well as VOC’s from some of the more exotic fdm materials like ASA) is a lot like that: little by little you add more of one solution to the other and at first you don’t really notice anything (beyond the volume increase), so you keep on adding more, when you finally hit the equilibrium point the whole solution suddenly changes colors.

    In practical terms, the more you’re exposed to resin VOC’s the more you’ll burn through your buffer, once it’s gone your body will basically go into panic mode whenever it comes into contact with said material. It’s one of those things that’s high enough on the fuck around side of things that you really don’t want to find out…

    That said, welcome to 3D printing! There’s plenty of resources around, so (for the most part) if you aren’t sure about something or run into trouble, all you have to do is ask!