Clearly 3D Printing

[Joel] picked up a wireless mouse kit. The idea is you get some 3D printing files and hardware. You can print the shell or make modifications to it. You can even design your own shell from scratch. But [Joel] took a different approach. He created a case with transparent resin. You can see the impressive result in the video below.

While the idea of buying the mouse as a kit simplifies things, we would be more inclined to just gut a mouse and design a new case for it if we were so inclined. We were more impressed with the results with the transparent resin.

Having transparent 3D printing capabilities opens up some artistic possibilities, like the benchy inside a glass bottle that makes a guest appearance on the video. The only limitation we can see is that your entire print has to be clear unless you do some hacky workarounds. For example, it would have been cool to have a mouse that was only transparent through a window. Short of painting the finished product, this would be tough to do with modern printers.

Even though you can get transparent filament, FDM printers have to work hard to get even sort of transparent. Even then, the results can be impressive, but nothing like what [Joel] is doing in resin, of course.

8 thoughts on “Clearly 3D Printing

  1. So he used off the shelf transparent resin to print a premade model in a Form 4 printer? What is noteworthy about this? I wouldn’t even call the end result truly transparent as it still diffuses the light quite substantially.

    1. Agreed, there’s nothing particularly noteworthy about it. Mold making as always been a thing hobbyist have used 3D printing for.
      Transparent 3D printing feels a bit disingenuous. Oh you didn’t actually make a clear 3D print You just printed a mold. Although I can’t really argue that it’s transparent but I wouldn’t call it clear. Probably could have used some better mold prep to get better results.

  2. Still think form4 is pricey.. the only thing this video shows is that formlabs hasn’t lost its marketing chops… If they can maintain this price in the market I am impressed 😁 ..

  3. My $99 creality halot one reain printer and $29 bottle of anycubic high clear makes perfectly clear resin prints every time, just get good at curing lightly like 1 min and wash it really really well maybe even scrub it in the alcohol wash and it will stay as clear as it is right out of the printer. It works great. It’s like 130 bucks seriously if u can get the halot one like I found it usually its 150 tho and high clear is usually 40 but I got ut for 30

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.