I have always prefered using Elegoo Mars' Water Washable photopolymer resin for its convenience, but I never truly knew... was I sacrificing quality for convenience? Well, I finally set out to answer that question for myself, using all my science and knowledge - Hitting it with a hammer!

Well ok, that is only a half truth. I DO hit it with a hammer, but for good reason I swear.

I have 3 Elegoo Mars Pro 3D Printers now, and so I thought I would run a little experiment to see if I could determine once and for all what resin I find to be the most useful for my Elegoo Mars Pro uses. I set up all 3 printers with 3 different types of resins, had them all print the same miniatures at the exact same time to try and make the test as fair and accurate as possible, and I got to printing.

My choices of resin were as follows - Ameralabs AMD-3 Resin (The Highest quality/cost commercially available resin that I could find after a solid 2 minutes of googling), Elegoo Mars Water Washable Photopolymer Resin in Black, and Elegoo Mars Photopolymer Resin in Gray. These will be the resins in which we conduct our experiment!

First things first, get the resin printing. I had no issues with the resin prints, as I have used all of these resins before, and so know how to set up my printers for optimal printing. I have put my print settings for all of the printers below:

Ameralabs AMD-3 settings:

BOTH Elegoo Mars Resins use the same settings:

After a few hours of printing, the first thing to note is that the Ameralabs resin prints faster than the other 2 resins. It is designed to be a quick printing resin, and so it saves about an hour or so of printing for every 8 hours of printing that you would do with the other resins. This isn't a big deal for hobbyists, but if you are printing MANY things per day, this could mean the difference in getting a print done, vs not. So props to Ameralabs.

After the prints were completed, I then need to do my post cure treatments. For the Ameralabs Resin, and the Elegoo Gray Resin, this meant and alcohol bath. This is my general hatred with resins that require Alcohol to wash excess resin off of them. It takes an entirely different product that I have to spend money on to clean my prints properly. There are other materials besides alcohol that you can use, but it is by far the most common. Isopropyl alcohol isn't cheap, and that cost adds up over time! So the Water Washable resin gets a point here. (The Points are arbitrary like in 'Whose Line is it Anyway?' but I don't know a cooler way to give them an 'atta boy'.)

The Water Washable resin on the other hand is so easy to wash off. I have a dedicated bucket for the excess water to fall in as I rinse the prints and print bed off with a garden hose. I LOVE the convenience of it all. It absolutely keeps me in the 3d printing game.

Support clean up is identical for all 3 resins, I noticed no difference in the ease of support cleanup/removal, nor any difference in the marks made on the materials.

After clean up, I then left the prints out in the sun for 3 hours, keeping the equivalent prints in the same orientation to create a fair and accurate test of the materials.

By the way, the miniatures that I printed come from Epics n' Stuffs on the MyMiniFactory Store, they are great! Very high quality prints and amazing presupports. :)

Now, with the post curing finally done, we can truly begin the rest of the testing. First is a visual inspection and comparison of overall quality. It is no doubt that the Ameralabs resin has a smoother product overall. Perhaps this is due to the lessened exposure time between each layer, but I seem to be able to more easily distinguise the build lines on the black water washable resin, and standard elegoo mars gray resin. (This difference is minor, but if we are really comparing things, it is an improvement.)

After comparing the prints, I began the fun part of testing... breaking the minis! I didn't have a scientific way to test the difference in durability, so know that the rest of my findings are completely subjective, but it's MY opinion on the matter that I care about when I am the one printing them, so I had to give these tests a shot. I hope you find my opinion valueable, but if you don't, I get that. :)

First up, I intentionally broke off the axe head of the dwarf barbarian's weapon. I compared how difficult this was between the three resins, and found the Ameralabs to be the most difficult weapon to break off. Water Washable Resins are known to be a bit more brittle, but I couldn't feel a noticable difference between the black water washable resin and the standard elegoo mars resin.

After that I broke off a smaller detailed piece - the tongue of a book mimic. All of the resins faired the same for this, and I could tell no difference in resistance between the three.

Then I tried to break the flaming skull miniature, which I thought was a thick piece of resin, but it turned out to be a hallow cast. (Not a fan of hollow casts, as there was still uncured resin inside of the skull. Not ideal.) But it allowed me to test out hollow figure durability, and I was surpised at the results. The Ameralabs resin was the most brittle, followed by the water washable resin, and the standard elegoo resin was the most durable. This possibly had to do with the longer exposure time that it received comapred to the Ameralabs, and the fact that the water washable resin is just typically more brittle, but I cant' say for sure. It's interesting none-the-less.

Eventually I tried sanding/filing down the resin with my metal file on the treasure chest mimic. The Ameralabs resin and standard elegoo mars gray resin faired about the same and sanded easily and smoothly. The water washable resin filed/sanded away far faster than the other two. I like to make dice masters with my prints, and so I was surprised at this result. Because it takes away material so quickly, I will probably actually change over to normal resins for my dice making, as I would never want to over sand my dice.

Afterwards I tried to scrape the resin with another piece of the same resin to see how resistant to scratches they were. I could see no discernable difference between the three, and so I can't give any of them the edge here.

I then tested the dwarf barbarian miniatures in a drop test from 3 feet high, mimicing a typical table hight for a mini to drop from. None of the minitures broke from the 3 foot tall drop, and I was very impressed! Props to all 3 :)

Finally, I did my favorite test - THE HAMMER TEST. I wasn't lying earlier, I did try and smash them with a hammer! To be fair, I let GRAVITY try and smash them with a hammer. I allowed the hammer to fall at the same height and same angle on the treasure chest miniatures with increasing height.

The shocking aspect, was that the hammer DID NOT break the minis! I couldn't even find a discernable dent in them. I was truly impressed at this point. Since I could no longer drop a hammer with gravity reliably on these mimic minis, I moved on to the dwarf barbarians and kept letting the hammer fall until something finally gave way! It took far more attempts than I expected, but eventually the standard elegoo mars resin was the first to break.

Don't take this as a cold hard fact that the standard grey resin is worse - in a typical setting if something as heavy as a hammer falls on a miniatures, 9/10 times it's going to break regardless of it's make-up. I will say that I was indeed surprised that the first to break was not the black water washable resin however.

With all that, what are my final thoughts? Honestly, it depends- but I hate when videos/guides give that answer, so I'll try my best.

Is the Ameralabs resin worth it? Honestly, probably not. The difference it makes for the average hobbyist is minimal, and so I'd save my money. BUT, if you are a YouTuber or someone who takes CLOSEUP shots of minis and looks for the FINEST details, then it DOES make a difference, and you should go for it.

Do I still prefer water washable resin? Yes and no. I will use water washable resin for miniatures, as it is still far more convenient, and the advantages the other resins gave were minor enough to not matter TO ME. I will however use regular resin for dice making now when I create my dice master before molding them in silicone, as I will be able to more finely control how much sanding I do to the material.

I hope that you found my experiment helpful, and try some experiments of your own! I'd be interested in hearing other people's opinions on the subject. :)

Thanks, and I hope you have a fantastic day!

Regards,

Ryan "Rybonator' Brainard

Ryan Brainard

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