Let's begin!
This will be a relatively short post on furnishing the 3d printing studio, so without further ado, let us begin. As you will know from our previous post on building the 3d printing and paint studio, we now have somewhere to print from! If you need to open another tab and read that post, you could do that now – or wait a bit!
Setting up the 3d printing studio
The space is right below the stairs that go up to the paint studio above and as a result, it is not massive. That being said, we are just re-starting the 3d print shop.
I asked that the cupboard be fitted with an extractor unit that vented vapours directly outside. It is not an industrial piece of equipment, but I think it’s absolutely better than nothing at all. In the future I could add some rubbery seals along the door edges to make things slightly better! We certainly weren’t going for a hermetically sealed area, but we want to vent as much as possible.
Space-wise, things are slightly tight, but we can make it work. I thought I had found a perfect table to process orders, but it was too wide! That now is residing upstairs but it’s still being used for processing and packaging orders to go.
I found a replacement worktop from the same place that I ordered the shelves from thankfully. It’s got a wipeable and chemical-resistant surface which is the most important part (at least for the chemicals I will use!) Originally, I was going to install it parallel to the tread of the stairs, but I
Printer Shelving
Now, we get to the difficult part of the setup – at least in this case that is the shelving. We are obviously just spinning up the 3d printing studio again with my old printers basically out of date. I will write future blog posts about the printers, but the main issue is clearance. That is to say, we need enough space to remove the lids and get to the prints.
I found some shelving which is pretty generic and available from a variety of places which I am going for. The main issue is building these and getting them into place. As a result, I purchased one medium sized shelf that was the largest that could fit. This means there will be less overall space for printers than we initially planned. We are only restarting right now, so one thing at a time, though!
This shelving is good and sturdy and I going forward I will be buying more of these particular shelves.
The Printers
Months ago, I did buy on a Phrozen Mini 8Ks and an Elegoo Saturn 3 Ultra – both have removable lids. Since I wrote the initial outline of this post, I purchased two more Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultras. On top of this, I made a decision that we will start selling scenery and to enable this, I have now in my possession two FDM printers. I hope in the future that I can do some unboxing posts and videos of both of the Bambu printers.
I was originally planning to continue using my old Nova3d Elfin printers – I found them to be good printers for my old Etsy store. However, I made my mind up that they can put sold and the Elegoo Saturns will easily pick up the slack.
As you can see, the printers are all sitting on silicone dehydrator mats which are barely the correct size. I will be replace them with silicone feeding mats one of which I already own – here is an affiliate link! They have a raised lip that will help in case of accidental leaks or spillages – at least a small amount.
The End - but not of the 3d printing studio!
So, that is the 3d printing studio set up and I am currently calibrating the printers and resin. There is still room for a few more printers and more expansion for us here at Glorious Miniatures. The goal obviously is to get to a point where we need to expand to a larger dedicated space, but for now, we have a fantastic starting point! Do consider checking out the webshop and see what prints we currently have available!
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