I had started a thread back in mid-July: Costs of maintaining a large resin library
It had to do with this, so I guess it lives on here…
As I try to grasp the economics of this for my case (independent designer, working alone), what I am seeing is, you might best settle on only 1 type of resin to do it all (such a pity!).
If you print about 35 prints with a 250-day tank, (or 1 print a week) you might add about 4,5 bucks of tank cost to each print, which is probably still less than the cost of the resin in an average print.
But if you divide that usage in 2 resins (ex: Draft and a second one for final parts) you are already paying more in tanks than in resin (or your prints need to be more than 50ml in average), which makes less sense.
If you want to have an “aggressive” resin too, for special cases (let’s say Elastic), and you use it less, obviously, it gets awkward: Given I have a project that needs rubber-like parts, I’d have a cost of 30 bucks per print on tank alone, if for example I need to print 5 times to fully develop a part.
I can translate the costs, but it’s a much harder sell!
We need a way to stop decay in-between prints…
Some might say the printer is not for me… But for who then? Only high-volume users? Isn’t this advertised as a prototyping machine too?
Or am I missing the point and this is the wrong approach to account for the cost of tanks?
PS: values are approximate to make for easier numbers (.ie tanks: 150usd)