My initial experience with a 3D printer came in 2020, when I got access to a buddy’s Creality LD-002R SLA printer. This was one of those awkward transition phases for SLA printers, where inefficient RGB LCDs finally got replaced by monochrome LCD panels, thus massively reducing the required exposure time and increasing the LCD panel’s lifespan.
The closely related Creality LD-002H is a monochrome SLA printer, but as this wasn’t the one that this friend opted for we had to learn the ropes on this more old-school printer. In terms of specifications this meant a build volume of 119 mm x 65 mm x 160 mm to play with and a claimed 26.1 µm resolution. Despite some struggles along the way, this machine churned out impressively high levels of detail with whatever cheap resin we threw at it, and even the post-printing processing became easy once we added a flex plate to the build plate and tweaked the cleaning and curing steps.
Despite all these positives, we both drifted away from resin printing, mostly due to the still messy and smelly printing process. FDM printers seemed like a better deal, especially after said buddy got his mittens on a used IDEX FDM printer. I would eventually go through a rather loathsome Creality Ender V2 experience before ending up with my current-day Elegoo Neptune 4, and resin printing seemed to be a thing of the past for me. Until recently, that is.
Things Have Changed
The Creality LD-002R MSLA 3D printer from 2020. (Credit: Creality)
Despite not having access to a resin printer any more, I still kept up to date on newly released hobbyist-level 3D printers of any type, as well as progress in technologies. Here I rather liked the digital light processing (DLP) types of resin printers, as they ditched the LCD and UV light source for a MEMS micro-mirror and laser setup for big power and weight savings. Unfortunately DLP resin printers appear to have fallen by the wayside again due to a variety of reasons, one of them apparently being scaling limitations with available DLP light engines and the manufacturers for the latter seemingly uninterested in this market.
Thus consumer SLA printing is still generally done with mono LCDs, which do not quite have the same efficiency and crisp edges for individual pixels as DLP, but which otherwise have come a long way, with better optics and light sources. A big push has also been towards larger build volumes, so despite new SLA printers tacking on more ‘K’s to their display resolution, the effective resolution isn’t that much better than a 2020 budget model. The real question is probably whether that’s even needed based on my own experiences printing fine details.
Perhaps the most exciting change is that with overall user-friendliness, such as easier bed levelling, the preventing of resin smells wafting out of the printer into the room, heated resin vats for reliable print results and UV-blocking lids that you can flip open instead of having to gently lift off the printer with dirty gloves while you desperately try not to drop it whilst scrambling to find a free spot to put it safely down.
Although the Creality LD-002R lists air filtration with a carbon filter, this was more filtration of the homeopathic variety. Instead of filtering anything, the tiny, noisy fan effectively blasted unfiltered, resin-rich air into the room. Thus one of the first thing we did was disabling this ‘feature’ by turning off the fan and sealing the air hole. This immensely improved the printing experience even with less optimal airflow in the room.
Picking A Resin Printer
The Anycubic Photon D2, the largest Anycubic DLP printer. (Credit: Anycubic)
The selection of resin printers to pick from these past years has been nothing short of overwhelming, even if you ignore the veritable flood of slightly different variations from certain manufacturers. Here DLP printers seemed different enough even with their small build space, to the point that I almost got one. Of course the long-awaited successor DLP printers never appeared, and the small build space was somewhat rough and put me off from an impulse buy.
Thus getting an SLA printer as a friend for my FDM printer seemed like the only option, but lacking real project motivation that idea got put on the backburner. It’s really hard to justify a purchase if you cannot justify such a financial expense, after all.
That’s when I suddenly got motivation shoved into my face, in the form of Uniformation contacting me about giving their GK3 Ultra SLA printer a shot. This would be a no-strings-attached chance to have a poke at what looked to be a rather nice and capable printer, even if its price tag of around $1,300 makes it something for people who really know that this is the resin printer they want.
I had heard of this Uniformation company before, as a smaller company that scored a pretty big hit with the somewhat-troubled-but-very-interesting GKtwo SLA printer, which had also featured on my shortlist at one point. The GK3 successor to the GKtwo had been baking in the resin printing community for more than a year by the time I got contacted, with gradual improvements over that time based on community and reviewer feedback.
This is quite different from most 3D printer companies who generally push out a new model in a take-it-or-leave-it sense, so I took them up on their offer for this printer to either play with or use as a very fancy coffee table, whatever I wanted. Based on the sheer verbal abuse I have read aimed at Uniformation during the GK3 development phase on especially sub-reddits, it makes me fairly confident that all major issues were fixed, and that at the very least it’ll be a massive upgrade over the LD-002R that’s pretty much my reference point.
Setting Up
In the world of 3D printers, it would seem that the idea of a flatpack parcel with your new 3D printer – as with my Ender 3 v2 and Neptune 4 bed slingers – has come to an end. A modern CoreXY kinematics FDM printer arrives fully assembled with only few exceptions – like Prusa 3D’s DIY kit offerings – so you’re looking at a very big box that weighs a lot. The similarly priced Prusa CORE One+ for example comes in at a cool 22.5 kg without packaging.
Super easy to move, barely an inconvenience. (Credit: Maya Posch)
The GK3 Ultra ups that to 35 kg, so I had a rather unhappy delivery bloke lug the ~40 kg box up a few steps from his van to where I could use furniture rollers to walk it over to its new home, next to the FDM printer in a sturdy rack. Lifting the printer into the rack was consequently also a bit of a chore, though less due to the weight and more due to the lack of any good places to grip it. I had to put on some good gloves for extra grip and to prevent the aluminium case from cutting into my flesh.
With that chore done, I could finally admire the fine mess that I had gotten myself into. First of all, the build volume is pretty massive, at 300 x 160 x 300 mm, almost fully beating the Neptune 4’s 225 x 225 by 265 mm. The GK3 Ultra is notably quite deep, at about 40 cm before adding space for the power and Ethernet cables, not to mention the provided Wi-Fi dongle if that’s more your thing.
Much of this extra space is taken up by the resin dispenser system, which I’ll cover more later. Within the rack you’ll need at least 85 cm between the two shelves if you want to put a resin bottle into the slot that’s conveniently placed on the top. Fortunately you can also pour resin directly into the vat and even make the flippy lid removable, but it’s a pretty hefty unit either way.
After liberating a lot of foam and goodies from the inside of the printer, I was finally able to start commissioning it. This involved removing a lot of protective film, running the exposure test to verify that the LCD and UV light source are working, and best of all a quick confirmation that the pre-levelled build plate was still level. Compared to the faffing about with four bolts on the LD-002R’s build plate assembly and sheets of A4 paper that I was used to, this was a massive improvement.
Time To Print
The resin that got sent along with the printer uses a special bottle style, which fits in the GK3’s resin feeding system. You slot the entire bottle into the hole on the top of the printer, from where it should automatically slot into all the tubing and widgets that are supposed to handle the resin flow. My only misgivings with this design is that each of these special cartridge-like bottles are only rated for ten insertion/removal cycles, after which you have to buy a new one.
Bottom of the Uniformation resin bottle, with the ports visible. (Credit: Maya Posch)
If you use non-Uniformation resin and are pouring resin into a special bottle, then this can be a bit of a pain, if only to keep track of just how many times you have inserted said bottle before you suddenly have it start draining fully into the vat, or whatever the failure mode here is. Fortunately you can also disable this feature if you’d rather pour the resin directly into the vat, which is probably what I’ll end up doing with typical resin bottles rather than use the provided empty special bottle.
Since the only bottles of non-expired resin that I have lying around use this automatic resin feeding system, I’ll be be giving it a shot. A total of two resin types are available to me, one is the water-washable type that’s supposedly not as smelly as the standard resin that I have always used, and which can be cleaned with plain water instead of IPA.
The other type of resin is ABS-like, which as the name suggests is a ‘tough’ kind of resin, targeting similar use cases as ABS, ASA and kin. For the test I’ll print everything with both WW and ABS, as well as in PLA on the FDM printer, to test both overall workflow, printing of fine detail, water-tight parts, heat-resistance and durability.
Test Setup
For a first printing round, I have so far printed a range of parts on the Neptune 4 in white PLA, and for the GK3 Ultra I will initially just use the ABS-like (AL) clear-blue resin, to not have to switch resins just yet, which is another fun topic to cover. These prints include a range of items like bottles, a miniature figurine and a bunch of LEGO Technic-compatible parts. The latter two serve to give dimensional accuracy a good workout, along with basic durability testing.
The print results and my initial findings will be in the next article, as this one is getting on in words. I’m also more than happy to consider any requests for aspects to test and questions to answer here. Although I have so far printed FDM parts in PLA, I’ll probably also be printing some parts in PETG and conceivably also TPU. Since I only have an open style FDM printer, engineering-grade materials such as ABS, ASA, etc. are naturally not available to me, for both practical and health-related reasons.