Bluecast X One castable resin… let’s give it a review.
Hey guys. I’ve never been afraid to admit that I really like
Bluecast resins, but I’ve never been afraid to criticise either where I thought it was necessary.
So I was delighted when Bluecast sent me a bottle of their latest Castable Resin.
I’ve heard a lot of good things about X One and a perusal of the Bluecast
information tells us that this resin was specifically designed with Monochrome
and DLP printers in mind, which is excellent. Bluecast claims this resin has great accuracy
and exceptional detail without shrinkage, which has got to be good and, even better, it has strong
adhesion, so no plate primer is needed which is a great improvement over earlier resins.
I do love the fact that X One is “Toxic and carcinogenic component free,” which
is a massive plus and something Bluecast should take great pride in.
Finding printer settings for Bluecast resins is now delightfully easy and I opted for the Phrozen
Sonic 4K. I fed this data into my preferred slicer and got ready for some printing.
It’s always best to read the information available and I didn’t do a great job as we’ll soon see,
but I did notice the importance of warming the resin before use. 30 seconds in the microwave was
sufficient to make the resin much more viscous. My first run of prints wasn’t perfect.
Of the 6 attempts, only one was any good and that’s what I mean about reading the instructions.
“Never use contact points under 0.4mm.” Well, that’s screwed me. I prefer Fine
and Medium supports. With Lychee these contact points are .2 and .25.
Even the Heavy supports only have .35 contact area so straight away none of these are suitable
for use with X One. That means all supports will have to be custom at .4 and above.
You know me guys, I’m always a bit daft, so I pretty much ignored the instructions, scrapped
the Light supports, increased the number of Medium supports and decided to have another bash.
However, if you’ve seen my Supports guide video, then you’ll know I always include
some large supports, and with Lychee these are custom and always with a full 1mm contact point.
This really anchors the print firmly to the plate and this concept is clearly
suggested in the X One guide here. I also decided to reduce the retraction
speed by 25% as slower speeds tend to be a little bit more forgiving.
Sure enough my second print run was more successful… not perfect, but improved. This time
3 of the prints were successful, one of which I’m not going to show you as it’s a project in hand.
Cleaning and curing is a little different. To begin with, IPA cannot be used here.
Instead you’ll need Ethyl Alcohol or Ethanol as it’s also called. Now this is great for
our cousins across Europe as I’m told you guys can get Ethanol everywhere and it’s nice and
cheap. Unfortunately here in the UK it’s not very common, though Amazon and eBay will hook you up.
However, UK guys expect to pay a little bit more than you would for IPA.
Cleaning and curing is a one step process with X One and you have two choices.
One, place your prints in a container with Ethanol,
agitating now and then for 10 minutes until you see a colour chance.
Two, still using Ethanol, use an Ultrasonic cleaner for 5 minutes.
To reduce the amount of alcohol I needed, I kept my prints in a small container and filled
the ultrasonic with ordinary water. As long as you don’t mix the two, this works very well.
In either cleaning case, the prints change from green to grey
and now need air drying for completion. You could use a compressor, which should
not be used on full strength, or even an aerosol can of air, though these can be costly.
I’ve actually got this mini compressor, designed for airbrush painting. It’s not strong enough to
damage the prints but it’s good enough to blast the grey to white, which is the goal. After this,
let the prints stand for 10 minutes. The printing quality bothered me.
In one respect I was absolutely delighted with it. I thought the resulting details were excellent.
Genuinely these are the best prints I’ve ever achieved with any Bluecast resin.
However, there were failures and the fault for those was mine. Most of my supports were .25mm
at contact point and not the recommended .4mm. But what bothers me is that large supports
can spoil the detail on a print, which is after all why we use thin supports.
So if you can’t live with thicker than average supports, X One isn’t for you.
So how does X One cast?
The Roman coin you’ve seen me do before, but this Chess themed ring is new to you. I designed it
ages ago and could never print it using Bluecast X10. Unfortunately, because of the support issues,
this still isn’t the perfect choice for casting, but I fancied giving it a go anyway. Now this
Filigree ring was very kindly sent to me by one of my viewers specifically to try on Castable resins,
so I can take no credit for this amazing design. Attaching wax sprues was no trouble at all.
Well that’s a not looking too bad… let’s just give it a bit of a clean.
Ah, now there’s a definite couple of holes there. However, I’ve never cast filigree before
so I’m not prepared to blame X One for this failure. I may well have sprued it poorly.
The Ultrasonic cleaner took care of the trapped plaster and oxidisation.
I’m not going to make a fuss of clean-up here. Two of these castings are duds anyway.
Well, I think it’s fair to say Bluecast X One has cast as well as you would expect from Bluecast.
There’s certainly plenty of detail here. All in all, it’s done an impressive job.
So what are my thoughts on Bluecast X One? Well I love how detailed the prints are,
but I hate the fact that just like with some of their other resins, we’re restricted by the
size of the print supports that we can use. This means careful clean-up will always be an issue.
Cleaning is delightfully simple with no wash & cure system needed,
though a little extra equipment like Ultrasonic Cleaners and mini compressors might well be.
Ethanol seems to be a cheap alternative to IPA for most folks, though not so much here in Blighty.
In terms of price, X One isn’t the cheapest castable resin that you’ll find,
but it’s nowhere near the most expensive either. I’d say it sits somewhere in the middle.
And of course, it casts. But what do you expect? Bluecast always does cast well.
So, if you read the instruction properly unlike this prize idiot, and if you can live with the
bigger than average print supports, then you will thoroughly enjoy Bluecast X One.
Like all resins you’ll need to tweak your settings and perfect using it.
For me, this is the best Bluecast castable resin that I’ve tried to date.
And that’s another finished review guys. If you have any questions, feel free to
drop me a line and I’ll do my best to help. So take care guys and thanks for watching.