BETTER cleaning & curing of 3D resin prints by VOG

hey guys 3d resin printing is great but the downside is cleaning and curing so i thought today i'd share a few simple techniques that i used to make life a little bit easier i started off cleaning my prints by swilling them around in ipa and whilst this works i found thorough cleaning is problematic then i got my first wash and cure machine and i was stunned by the difference so much easier and so much cleaner but unfortunately they seem to really use a lot of ipa which increases costs for that reason i've shared with you my easy technique for recycling ipa and what follows is how i use this to maximum effect with my prints fresh off the printer i found a very useful practice is to quickly blast away excess resin with a spot of air i concentrate around detailed areas and the supports as this is where resin builds up now this is an optional step but it does help considerably this is a cheap and cheerful airbrush with a mini compressor and whilst it's not fantastically powerful at this scale it works well and comes in useful more than once this jar contains 100 recycled ipa and it's horrible dirty stuff but that doesn't matter dunking freshly blasted prince for just a few seconds even in dirty ipa is an excellent way to remove 90 percent of the uncured resin now at this point i'm frantically looking around for my tongs which i didn't find until later so please don't make the mess i do here now you're good to use your wash station as normal this is the mercury x that i reviewed a few days ago the ipa inside is recycled but it's fairly clean i give the prince a spin for two minutes and let the impeller do its thing once cleaned i like to roughly remove my supports as i find these are unfortunately great at trapping and hiding uncured resin i'm not looking for perfection here just the removal of the bulk of the supports once this is done i'll clean again the problem is however with supports removed prints are often very delicate it's easy to imagine parts of this model getting wedged into the basket of the wash station and getting damaged by the force of the turbulence in such cases it's safer to go back to the jar and swirl but if you have an ultrasonic cleaner there's a much better way this container holds yet more recycled ipa actually hang on a moment it's important to note that repeated recycling of ipa eventually leads to sticky unusable stuff so to maximize my recycling efforts i tend to rank my recycled ipa in order of cleanliness from almost brand new to almost no use the dirtiest ipa is ideal for the initial dunking method as there we're just trying to get rid of the bulk of the uncured resin for stage 3 washing i want nice clean recycled fluid and when it comes to this next stage i want the ipa to be at least as clean if not a little bit cleaner and that's what's in this container previously i've used a glass jar for this technique but one of my viewers suggested changing to a plastic container as this allows the vibration from the ultrasonic cleaner to travel through the content more easily and i have to say my viewer was right so a plastic container is highly recommended immerse the prints and then place them into the ultrasonic cleaner the surrounding liquid is just ordinary water there's no point filling the whole thing with ipa unless you're trying to do a larger print two minutes in the ultrasonic cleaner makes an incredible difference probably better than a wash and cure in my opinion and in many ways it's better because there's no risk of damaging fragile prints however one quick and very important safety note here ultrasonics like this tend to heat up the liquid they take half an hour or so to do this but heating up a flammable liquid like ipa is a potential fire hazard so just a couple of minutes is ample and don't leave it unattended an optional further step at this point is to spray with completely clean brand new unused ipa to rinse everything away leaving you with a fully cleaned print you can use an ordinary hair dryer on a cool setting to dry off your prints or you can just let them drip dry personally i found this airbrush tool excellent for this job it gets in all the nooks and crannies particularly with hollow prints driving out all the excess and drying things off much more quickly this should leave you with a spotlessly clean print made possible with mostly recycled ipa now we just need to cure it when i first started out i used a fingernail uv lamp and a cardboard box covered in foil and this approach does work but the curing station makes life so much easier again and i love the legume mercury x with its slow turntable and three uv light arrays but i think we can actually improve on this by redirecting all those stray uvs the cardboard box gives us a clue and a look at the reflective surface on the anycubic wash and cure plus reinforces this it turns out one of the few things that reflect uvs well is aluminium or aluminum to our american cousins so ordinary kitchen fall is ideal a bit of cardboard glue and double-sided tape helps us improve the efficiency of our curing station [Music] i can't promise it will make a discernable difference but i believe those bouncing uv rays give us more coverage this way and by way of proof here's another fantastic model from archfield and games printed on the frozen sonic 4k using frozen 4k aqua grey resin other than the little tidy up on the supports i think that's about as good as you'll get now if you think all of the above sounds like a lot of work it really isn't in reality it's very simple especially if you're prepared which clearly i wasn't here but you get the idea so that's it for this one guys i hope you found something useful here so take care and thanks for watching

Channel: VOG

Views: 55,585

Keywords: cleaning tips, curing tips, 3d print, resin, wash and cure, 3d printing, vog, vegoilguy

Id: kL9TCjtPbw4

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021