How to Clean | Recycle | Reuse IPA (Isopropyl Alcohol) for 3D printing by VOGMAN

ipa costs money but it can be recycled hey guys i do a fair bit of resin printing and get through a lot of ipa when cleaning prints but rather than four count for more i eke it out as much as possible here's your typical used ipa dirty and cloudy but we can get this nice and clean initially i use one of these resin straining filters pour the used ipa into a clear bottle plastic or glass and filter out any bits of solidified resin that may be there what's left is cloudy and messy then this is full of uncured resin it's very easy to get rid of this just place the bottle on the windowsill indoors for a couple of weeks make sure it's helped the ridge of kids and mark the bottle to make sure no one drinks it by accident there's no rigid time frame involved just wait for it to become clear there's more than enough uv coming through the glass to do the job even our window that doesn't see direct sunlight eventually you end up with something like this hopefully yours will be a little bit clearer but i'll come back to that in a minute now we need to filter this again to remove the cured resin sediment i found paper coffee filters work very well and i purchased these cheaply on amazon just place them in a funnel and pour gently into a container well that's the ideal way of doing it but the problem is the funnel blocks off very quickly the funnel has quite a small opening through which the liquid has to flow so despite the size of the filter paper only this part actually filters and once that clogs you need another filter paper which is very wasteful so i designed this filtering funnel it's essentially one funnel inside another the innermost funnel has lots of holes in it meaning the small surface area for the filter to act upon i simply printed this on an fdm printer though a resin print might survive a fair while trust me this is a vast improvement on a standard funnel though paper filtering is still not a fast process but it is quite efficient it's easy enough to design your own filtering funnel but if you fancy supporting me you can buy the stl file on my etsy store from there you can rescale it as you wish and it's a simple support free print and the funnel works great alternatively maybe a simple sieve would work and that in a nutshell is how i recycle my ipa and double triple and even quadruple the life of it however i find once i've repeated this process several times the recycled ipa takes on more color like this one and perhaps because i use a lot of speciality resins it becomes a little sticky and just doesn't clean properly this got me wondering if there was another way to clean this and i found myself thinking back to my school day chemistry classes and once i'd stopped thinking about miss randall and her delicate handling of my bunsen burner i thought about distillation put simply distillation converts a liquid into a gas and then condenses this back into a liquid the process is perfect for removing impurities and that means another mad experiment for me [Music] [Music] [Music] now a quick word of caution here boiling alcohols is a volatile affair and you're dealing with very flammable materials as well as obvious safety concerns there could well be a question of legality in some areas as you're effectively running a still i decided to use a water bath to support my distillation vessel as this should hopefully slow down the heat transfer and make it more controllable the filtered ipa goes into the flask the flask goes into the water bath or in my case a saucepan these sit on a tripod above a bunsen burner a hose from the flask is connected to a collection vessel which sits below the level of the flask so the water in the saucepan was heated to around 85 degrees celsius this in turn heated the ipa to the same temperature and caused it to boil this generates steam or vapor inside the flask and thanks to my makeshift bung the vapor now had nowhere to go except into the hose where it cooled condensed and theoretically became nice clean ipa but did it work well yes but it took ages honestly i ran the thing for about three hours and found i was constantly adjusting the temperature to prevent things from getting too hot in hindsight a bunsen burner was not really the way to go even though memories of miss randall made it very special for me if i lived in a sunnier climate a solar still would be safer and more practical alternatively a more controlled hot plate might work better too but frankly given the amount of energy time possible legality and sheer danger involved distilling ipa is not something i'd recommend anyone doing unless chemistry really is your thing by all means filter your ipa in the fashion i described at the beginning and extend its purchase life but if and when it stops being effective just shop around and get a better deal it makes much more sense so there you go guys i hope you enjoyed this video that's it for now take care and thanks for watching

Channel: VogMan

Views: 183,118

Keywords: IPA, 3d print, resin, cleaning ipa, filtering ipa, reuse ipa, recycle ipa, distillation, vog, vegoilguy, Isopropyl Alcohol

Id: 5U1IshPqmak

Length: 7min 32sec (452 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021