Originally Posted by
ChrisAlbertson
No. It is the other way around. I have some parts made in a Formlabs liquid resin printer and I can't break them with a hammer, They can be very seriously tough. The key is to use a non-rigid resin that comes out like solid nylon.
Ah, that's interesting to hear. Like I've said, I have zero first-hand experience with liquid resin printers, just FDM. An aquaintence of mine with the same FDM printer as me recently got a cheap liquid resin printer, and it has me thinking. He was using it mostly for figurines and such, and they looked absolutely amazing, and would be either impossible or else extremely tedious for me to do on my FDM printer. He did say that they were extremely fragile, but if there are different resin formulations available with different toughness values and whatnot I can easily see me being quite mistaken about this. If one can get liquid resin prints as tough as nylon then I can easily see that being a great solution for bike mounts and such.
That said, for the person who wants just one part for their own bike, you can send the design file to a service and get the part for 1% of the cost of buying a printer. Buying a liquid resin printer that can use this "tough" material is only for the person who intends to make literally hundreds or thousands of parts. For most hobby users buy sub $200 FDM printer and it will do 90% of what you need the hire out the 10% you can't do yourself. FDM is good enough even for me who is right now designing a power steering gearbox for a robot car. I'll likely need to make a half dozen test-fit parts that get tossed in the trash an hour after they are printed. Only the last version needs to be strong enough to work.
I hear ya. If I get a liquid resin printer it'll be because I'm a 3D printing hobbyist* and just want one, not just so I can print a bike part. I agree with your advice re: non-hobbyists. It's definitely not worth the money for a 3D printer just to save money printing a couple of things one wants, assuming those things are otherwise fairly cheap, as bike mounts generally are. But for a 3D printing hobbyist this area is a gold mine of ideas for things to design and print.
I've already got everything mounted to my bike that needs mounting, so my need for 3D printed mounts was non-existent, but I just ordered a Cycliq Fly 12 CE combined front light/bike camera, and it won't work with the mount my current light is affixed to. I'm thinking I'll have to design a over/under combo mount for the Cycliq light/camera and my Garmin Edge 530, and print it in nylon. If the design works out well enough perhaps it would be a good candidate for me to send out this one time just to see what comes back from a print service in a tough liquid resin, as you mention.
*highly self-customized D-Bot printer that I built originally using parts I printed on my old cheap Chinese FDM printer, and have since upgraded with parts of my own design combined with some parts other D-Bot owners have contributed