Resin printing safety

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I guess it comes down to those subjective terms “better” and “safer”.
For me, resin printing is “better” as in the quality of the print is far superior, and being able to print tiny tiny details makes the machine itself far more useful than an FDM printer (for producing miniatures and scatter terrain). The amount of hassle from using cleaning chemicals like acetone is worth it, to be able to print any number of super-detailed miniatures – at any scale I like.

Safer is more difficult to assess; yes, resin printing is more messy (and potentially inconvenient to clean up) than FDM (but using filler and sanding and acetone vapour baths to clean up print lines from FDM is pretty messy too). But is resin printing less safe?
There are lots of concerns about odour and potentially volatile compounds in the slimy goop, but I don’t know of anyone who has actually been harmed through using a resin printer. I do know at least two people, personally, who have had their apartments burned to the ground because of a dodgy/cheap chinese fdm printer bed (FDM printers are no longer allowed to be used unattended – just like the dishwasher – at our local hackspace, since both were members, and for the same reasons).

So “is FDM safer to use indoors than resin?” gets an “absolutely not” from me.
FDM printing smells just as much as modern resins do – I can’t stand the hot plastic-y smell of ABS printing, and while the sickly-sweet smell of PLA fusing isn’t unpleasant, it’s also something easily overlooked. But does “smelliness” equate to “unsafe”?

Is a resin printer save to use indoors? Absolutely. There’s no way in the world you’re going to burn your house down if your resin printer “goes wrong” when left unattended, since it’s some goop and a mobile phone screen. Will you be able to tolerate the smell? That’s – for me – not a safety issue, any more than you don’t spray aerosol primer in your bedroom because it’s unsafe, but because to do so is unpleasant.

I genuinely don’t see resin printing as “unsafe”. Messy, yes.
But FDM printing? It could be if you don’t know what you’re doing.

 

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There is a safety concern with how you handle resins but you can mitigate that with care and knowledge. You don’t want it on your skin as it can cause a chemical burn and develop an alergy. But you aren’t supposed to touch it without gloves. You also need to set up a good workflow of how you handle uncured resin with clean up. Vapors should be mitigated with ventilation and ideally a respirator mask. I mean a table saw or a laser cutter are also dangerous if used improperly. So I wouldn’t rule out one or the other just on that but it is good to know what you are signing up for when getting into either method.

Is it for everybody? Hell no. And that is totally fine. I’ve been printing now for about two months for my project and have been having a lot of fun but I see it additive to my hobby rather than replacing metal or plastic kits. All materials are fun in their own ways to use. I don’t see a point to print out WW2 minis when there are already good and affordable kits out there, unless I find a sculpt I’d like to use.

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