The from Banggood sounds on the surface like an all-day project (but it isn’t). If you have already assembled an SLA 3D printer, depending on your skill levels, you may know that this can be a treacherous task, which is one reason my first Tevo Tarantula Prusa I3 3D Printer Kit back in 2017 didn’t go so well and put me off the subject for a long time. Well, things have changed – I’ve gained experience putting together Laser Engraver kits and of course had a play with several pre-assembled 3D Resin printers now.
And so it is that I find myself putting together another SLA 3D printer, this time with a difference: the FLSun Q5 is not so much a kit as a flat-pack – the top of the unit is already in one piece as is the bottom – the only significant aspect of putting together the Q5 involves assembling the three support legs onto the base and top, mounting the three parallel arms, the extruder head, the filament mounting bracket and temporarily fitting the auto-leveller. To get that far I spent a little over an hour (a far cry from the 5 hours I spent assembling my last laser engraver). One really nice aspect of this kit is that all the bolts are the same size!
I should point out at this time that the stock photo to the right (which I’ll soon replace) represents the Q5 quite well except for the obvious lack of cables – Chinese manucfacturers do that a lot in their ads. In this case, all that is missing is the SLA feed pipe and 2 cables. By the nature of such printers, the cables cannot really be neatly hidden away 🙂
So, what we have is a glass base plate with the electronics and power supply in the top. Three stepper motors which you can see at the outer ends of the parallel arms, do all the lifting and the printer does indeed have a pretty LCD display/control panel at the top.
Capacity is 200mm dia by 200mm height. In use you would have a reel of SLA material mounted on the filament mounting bracket and feeding the tiny print head you see just above the example yellow material in the image above. In the image on the left, we see what you get, but not the spare head, autoleveller, electrical snips, screwdriver, head cleaner or various Allen keys, and shed-load of bolts, sample length of SLA and other bits and pieces including USB 2 lead and 220v power lead which all come supplied with the kit.
My next job, having completed putting the printer together is to use the auto-leveller to set it up (something I’ve never done before) – then I should be ready to go with my first print using the sample PLA material. Mmm, it just occurred to me, the sample material isn’t on a reel. More later.