Resin printers and paintball

[madmar1009]

Has anyone done any work for paintball equipment with resin printers?

[bellicose]

I printed a barrel.

[JonM]

I was under the impression that resin printers produced a model too fragile for use in paintball. Is this not the case?

[Rainmaker]

Lordkyleofearth was making some of the parts for his ATS mags with a resin printer.

JonM I think that as far as impact resistance goes, yeah you are probably right. But there are some applications that might benefit from the fine detail. Or if you want to print something solid, then the durability might not be an issue.

[madmar1009]

With newer resins they parallel pla in many instances. But finding people in paintball who have tested these claims.. is another.

[bellicose]

I've got a Form 2 and Form 3 at work, and their are many different materials to choose from. Some are "tough" and some are high detail, but fragile. I have one that is like tpu, very flexible. I also have one that is heat resistant, more so than anything you can get on an FDM printer.

What parts do you have in mind?

[mikeshalo]

I’d love to know the results of this too. The parts look so much cleaner on SLA than FFF.

[madmar1009]

Ok. So be careful with 'Blu' It literally took the glass off my build plate when I removed it.... Holy crap.
Also the test pieces i printed were good and strong. I threw it, stood on it and it still would break (270 lbs) It deformed but didn't break and later came back to near tolerance...

[Beaver]

The quality of prints produced by filament printers is acceptable for most paintball applications, so I don't expect resin prints will displace them any time soon. Current filament materials have a lot of advantages when it comes to temperature resistance and impact resistance, which are important for what we're using the equipment for. But as more development is put into new resins, I expect that they'll catch up in terms of material properties. Though I've never tried some of the tough resins, I hear they're comparable or better to PLA and PETG.

For small components, resin printers have some good applications. Trigger components in particular would benefit from having some fine features on the print - the Etha 2 trigger mod I use would probably benefit from that. I also like resin prints for small retainer components for electronics and things like that.