When most people think of 3D resin printer they think of miniatures and printers like the Elegoo Mars and Anycubic Photon which seem to dominate the markets now. But what about larger miniatures that just won’t fit onto those print beds, or that have to be sliced into so many pieces it’s a nightmare to assemble afterwards?
Enter the Large Format 3D resin printers like the Peopoly Phenom. This beast is about the size of a mini fridge and has a huge print bed that will you print most of your minis and models in one pass without the needs to slice them up. And I just got one…. oh yeah.. it’s on now…
So I purchased this second hand because they were having issues with it because of where they had it and were trying to use it. The environment wasn’t working in their favor and produced a lot of failed prints. Failed prints on one of these means a lot of wasted resin. Knowing how to deal with temperatures issues I didn’t think it would be a problem for me so I got my monies together and made the plunge.
Now as I said, this thing is about the size of a mini fridge and I probably should have taken the truck when I went to get it. It’s big and it’s heavy.
Anywho, I got it home after removing the roof on my car and into the house with the assistance of a hand truck. Into the bathroom/printer farm it went. First thing was to give it a good cleaning up and then level the bed, make sure everything was in good working order and load it up with resin.
Another problem it seemed they were having might have been because of the resin they were using, it’s not listed on the Phenoms recommended list but that doesn’t exactly mean it won’t work, but I do know that it can be a finicky resin so when combined with the temperature issue it didn’t help.
I loaded it up with almost a full liter of Siraya Tech Simple Clear, my goto resin these days and started out with something small that wouldn’t take too long. Just a little miniature. I put 5 of them on the build plate, one in each corner and one in the middle and sliced it up in Chitubox and vwooosh, off to the printer it went. Four hours later, I had 5 little guys that printed perfectly.
Now we get into the reason I wanted such a big printer. High capacity, large format printing.
Presently I have several models that I wish to sell, they have to be split into pieces to fit on the Elegoo Mars build plate. This means that the end user has to assemble them and if they don’t do a good job, the model has gaps/seams and doesn’t look good for them and ultimately it reflects on me. I want to deliver a decent product right from the start. So I’m limited to printing one model per printer at a time because of the size. With the Phenom, I am printing 6 of them at a time. I can put 10 of them on there but wanted to try 6 just to be on the safe side since it was only my second print with it. Right now we’re over halfway finished of a 17 hour print.
So there’s the 6 Hind D models all printing happily at the moment, and if you’ve ever wanted to see what they look like printing here ya go.
That cool glow is the UV light showing through the LCD mask and curing the resin so that it sticks to the other cured resin.
All in all I’m VERY impressed and pleased with the Phenom. It works just like the Elegoo Mars, uses Chitubox which is a massive bonus in my book because it means I don’t have to bounce between 2 different programs like I do with the Anycubic Photon. Right now the only cons I have is that it’s loud and it will take a whole liter of resin if you let it lol.
UPDATE 2-15-2021: Sorry, work got in the way of me posting this update sooner, but… IT WORKS PERFECTLY !!!! I was able to pop off 6 Hinds today with no problem !!!
