i have a bucket full of chemicals and a handful of surprising results let's talk about some resin
cleaning alternatives just before you skip ahead to find out the tldr it's propylene glycol and
i'd really appreciate a thumbs up what's up i'm jonathan and welcome to maker tales this
video is sponsored by thangs as you can tell we're looking at alternatives for cleaning resin prints
more specifically i'm looking for safe and non-flammable alternatives
so i'm not really looking at price here i'm looking mainly at safety so with that said
the first thing you're probably going to think is hey just go simple green just go mean green
i can't do that i'm based in the uk and in fact all of the eu they we just don't have
mean green or simple green and if we do want to get that we need to import it in at these
crazy prices and that's just not going to happen now for me personally i'm finding an alternative
because i almost blew myself up the first time that i was looking into resin printing
because i have a teeny tiny workshop i was doing a lot of spraying of ipa to clean my prints and
the vapor build up got really high and then when i took my mask off i realized one spark and that
would have gone boom now yes i can ventilate more i could open up my door but keep in mind
that this is my workshop that i keep at a constant 25 degrees and up i also keep it at a constant of
40 humidity because i'm doing sla and i'm doing fdm in there and i'm based in scotland so if
i open up that door i'm literally fighting against mother nature to keep that constant
and i'm just not about that so i had to find a safer alternative and that's what leads me to
this video right here now as i can't get simple green i mean green i basically just bought
every industrial degree so that i could get my hands on which were all of these here and then i
also looked at all the material data safety sheets and all of them so if there are any good chemicals
that kept popping up and also did a whole bunch of research online and finding forms and stuff
and there were two main ones that kept coming up which was sodium carbonate which is basically soap
and also propylene glycol which is crazy because that's a food preservative mainly as well as a
cosmetic agent which is a little bit weird and it's food safe i don't know it just was weird
so let me talk about the methodology now when it comes to the methodology i wanted to try and stay
as fair and consistent as possible so i stuck with the amira labs little test torture test city thing
here and i did all 12 at the same time yes 12. even though you might see that i only have nine
different chemicals there's 12 in total because we have no cleaning at all we have ipa 99.9
and we also have water so i just wanted to really show what we get and also here's a great example
to show you why we do the cleaning in the first place now you might be thinking hey that one that
hasn't had any cleaning at all is very resin logged why does it look that bad well it's
actually to do with consistency what i basically did was take them all off the build plate and then
put them into a bag of resin because i was going to do this sort of methodology of cleaning take it
out from that bag put it into another bag just with the chemical give it a little slush about
in my hands then put it down into my ultrasonic cleaner for exactly five minutes take it out from
there pull it out dunk it in some nice fresh water then i use up some hair dryer on it a little bit
of air compressor and then hair dryer once again and then i put that to cure for three minutes and
i did that for absolutely every single one i kept it as consistent as possible there was no brushing
no nothing it was basically as much out of my hands as it could be so i could be as consistent
with thin all of this so that it really was the actual chemical working on it and not my sort of
labor at it because in reality you can pretty much clean anything with anything if you just feel like
really putting in the time and cleaning it with a brush and so on and so forth this is why you can
really dilute ipa all the way down and still it's quite cleanable with it because it still does
dissolves it a little bit now talking about the whole dilution i felt like keeping this
as consistent as possible and using no dilution whatsoever for all of these so these are all as
pure as possible the only one which is the sodium carbonate that is basically four parts water one
part sodium carbonate because that is pretty much as much as i found that i could dissolve
into the water itself so it's as sodium carbonated as possible now let's talk about results but just
before that let's have a quick interesting word from this video sponsor thangs as you
may know thagns is a community for all kinds of 3d enthusiasts with a selection of over 3.5
million free models to download they support 27 different file types and are planning to add even
more they are constantly updating and improving and currently have a very
interesting alpha workspace which you can apply to test out it's basically github for 3d models
in other words 3d version control which just blows my mind so be sure to check thangs out
using the link down in the description using that link you're not only just checking out a
great community but you're also helping me out to create more videos like these and for that
thank you now jumping straight into the results i want to break this into two batches of six
the lower six and then the top six remember that obviously the worst spot is going to be
not cleaning at all and the best spot is ipa but we're trying to see and measure between those two
spots in itself so the bottom six was obviously nothing at all then we had sodium carbonate
that's right we had something that was worse than water which is the next one then we had auto gleam
citroclean and gunk ultra i wouldn't suggest any of these at all because quite frankly they sucked
just don't use them they just don't work then from there we have the top six and that's where things
get interesting starting off we have super tfr then we had two that were pretty much identical
which is mock off and gunk green and then we had no nonsense and propylene glycol and number one
was ipa so the best one out of all of these was propylene glycol this was a real surprise to me
because i did all of these tests completely blind i had no idea what was what there was
just a little number on the bottom of all of those went to another room and then i graded them and
when i found out that it was propylene glycol it was mind-blowing now propylene glycol is a really
interesting result because you can get it in small batches big batches and huge batches
because it's an ingredient used in many different industries from the cosmetic industry to medical
industry to the e-cigarette industry and smoke machine industry that's right propylene glycol
is the active ingredient that makes smoke machine smoke smoke and in fact the more propylene glycol
is in that liquid the longer and thicker that smoke will be so who would have thought
smoke machine liquid now there's a lot more interesting things about this for instance
this one specifically is vegan it's also food safe so technically you could eat this but i wouldn't
suggest it because it's just a preservative in the medical industry it's used to remove excess water
and the cosmetic industry is a preservative as well as a medium so it's pretty safe stuff now of
course once you use it with resin it's no longer safe at all and there's a lot more testing for me
to do here for instance it's thicker than water so i can't spray this through a bottle so i'm gonna
have to see if i can dilute this in some way and see if it still works i don't know if it becomes
resin logged really quickly i also don't know if it separates maybe the resin because this is
thicker than water it might separate it might also basically be unusable after three prints
so i don't know there's a lot of testing to go but it's definitely interesting now something
i said i wasn't going to do that i am going to do is talk about price it is more expensive than ipa
just for example i get my ipa at about 17 pounds 50 that includes tax and postage and the cheapest
that i can get the propylene glycol is from a wholesaler for about 18 pounds 50 plus tax
plus shipping so as you can see it's a little bit of a gray area there because in reality i'm
probably going to be paying 30 pounds for 5 liters but for me that's worth it just due to the safety
and that was the key thing that i was looking for here anyway that there are my results a huge thank
you to my patrons you guys are absolutely awesome and it means the world to me to have your support
it's what makes maker tales possible basically and if you're enjoying what i'm making here you think
i'm worthy of your support i would love to see you there too don't forget that we have a discord
and that's linked down in the description thank you for watching keep making at the quest continue