Resin printing is making its way forward within the 3D printing industry. In addition, there is a concern over the safety of it as well as the cost involved in post-processing. As a result, Elegoo has now produced their Elegoo Water Washable Resin which removes the need of using IPA to wash your prints post-processing! Let’s see how it performs!
Packaging
The Elegoo Water Washable Resin came in a large box printed with lots of information about the product in addition to the usual warnings. I was sent the Ceramic Grey colour. Within the box, you have your bottle of resin protected by an inflated bottle protector as well as a small paintbrush. For example, this is used to help in post-processing your prints by allowing you to get in the small crevices!
Printing
My first print using the Elegoo Water Washable Resin is a scary pumpkin model. I can’t remember where this came from (most likely Facebook) As a result, I can’t unfortunately, credit the creator. Using the default settings of the Longer 3D Orange 10 resin printer, this printed extremely well!
To post-process the prints with water, I just cut a 2-litre bottle in half. This resulted in 2 disposable containers filled with water. Firstly, 1 half for the first rinse and secondly the other half for the second rinse. It seemed to work well and as you can see, it did get the excess resin off. When finished with this, I can seal up both halves and then dispose of responsibly through my local waste carriers. DO NOT pour this down the sink as it will affect aquatic life.
Another method is to use a clear container to put your used water in and leave it out in the sun to cure the resin inside. You can then dispose of the resin pieces and re-use the water!
The finished print hardly had any visible layer lines and support removal was a little fiddly as this is a miniature model, but they came off cleanly!
Batman
My next print for the Elegoo Water Washable resin is Batman which is modelled by Sanix. In addition, I opted to change the recipe settings for this after finding some via Twitter to see how this would affect the printing.
As a result, this model printed great, however, apart from the head. No idea what happened there! I did trim the brim from it, so may have trimmed a little too much, or I may have scaled it wrong. Other than that, it all came together and it looks great! In addition, I just used your normal superglue to stick the various parts together. I did do some trimming on the edges of some parts. My future plan is to paint this, so hopefully, that will bring out more detail and in addition get it looking awesome!
Washing in the water is easy and smell free! It washes away the excess resin with ease and with the brush provided, you can get in all the nooks and crannies!
More information
For more information, check out Elegoos video below which shows you the Elegoo Water Washable resin in action!
Where to buy?
Elegoo Water Washable resin is available to purchase via Amazon. There is only Grey available, but over time, hopefully, more colours will be released!
Conclusion
To sum up, Elegoo Water Washable resin is a great product! Not only does it print great, but the fact you can wash with water means less expense and using fewer chemicals for post-processing!
I would like to see other manufacturers follow this route. By making water washable resin the norm, however, you are then faced with the problem of disposal. If in doubt, contact your local authority who are best to advise on how to dispose of the water once you have finished with it.
I hope you enjoyed this article. If you want to read more, then check out Nova3D Resin review – Is it a Nova-lty Come and see? or how about iFun 3D printer resin review – Is it a lot of fun!?
A great resin that reduces the need for extra chemicals for post processing. Produces great detail in prints just like any other resin. A must buy! Let's hope other manufacturers follow the way forward with water washable resin!
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When you’re printing figures that small you can afford to dial down the supports quite a bit from the default slicer settings in Longerware – especially the diameter of the supports. You don’t really want as thick ones as the default gives you, as they’re not supporting much weight and the thicker diameter increases the likelihood of accidentally snapping or cutting off part of your model. As a bonus, thinner ones are also a lot easier to remove in general. I print a lot of tiny diorama parts on my Orange 10 and the default support settings are definitely massive overkill.
You can almost certainly get away with dialling down the density to a max of around 0.7 as well – I’ve never had any problems printing even heavier items with lots of overhangs at a max of 0.7 density. 0.7 for density and scaling the diameter by size of print (with the occasional manual edit) tends to work out best I find.
Good review though! Curious to see how well prints with this hold up over time given the different formulation, tensile and shear strength tests might be interesting too.