Powercast Dark Castable Resin,
let’s have a look at it… Hey guys,
Powercast have been kind enough to send me this bottle of their castable resin and as you’ve seen
from my previous videos, I do like their products. Normally I review resins after a few weeks of
practice casting but in honesty I can’t do that this time.
It’s only a small bottle and it’s expensive stuff, so you can’t blame Powercast for being frugal,
but it does mean I simply haven’t got the resources to experiment with.
If we take at look at the Powercast website looking for printing settings, on first glance
it looks like there’s plenty of information here. But there are a lot of popular printers missing
from these listings and on closer inspection, the settings themselves are a little dubious.
Essentially I think these are guesses, and that’s pretty normal. Settings vary between models and
even from printer to printer. This generally means to get the best from any resin, it’s necessary to
experiment a bit and adjust the settings. But test prints waste resin and as I’m excited to
cast from this resin, I’m just going with the basic settings, using the Phrozen Sonic 4K.
I started with a test print, I just had to, and that’s the Ameralabs Town print.
And look at that. That’s pretty good. Even though I have absolutely no doubt I can improve on these
printer settings with a little practice, that’s a nicely detailed, sharp print. And that’s what
Powercast Dark is for – detailed casting prints, aimed specifically at the Jewellery market.
So for me, that meant casting a ring or two, and I already have two to hand.
The first is the Opensource ring on Thingiverse that is packed with detail.
The second is the test print that came with the Phrozen Sonic 4K.
I’ve always had issues with Powercast Resins sticking to the build plate
and I see from their website that they are now producing a primer to combat this issue,
so that’s something to look out for. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of that,
so I’ll stick with my printed Prime Coat method that I’ve already shown you.
Being black, it’s hard to show, but these prints have come out very nicely. There’s
plenty of detail here, but that also includes some printing lines. So let’s do some sanding.
It responds very well to sanding. The resin seems firm
without being brittle. It’s easy to sand to a fine finish.
There’s a general rule when experimenting with anything and that’s NOT to alter two
variables at once and of course here I did. The first is this new resin and the second is this…
It’s casting grain which I bought from Riogrande.com.
It’s called Ancient Bronze and whilst I’m keen to try it,
I really shouldn’t have tried it on this occasion, not when trying a new resin. I’ll never learn
That looks pretty good.
Yes, it’s promising, but it’s hard to see under that oxidisation and plaster.
Ah… good and bad here. The level of detail seems excellent,
but the castings aren’t perfect. I’ll have a quick bash at cleaning them.
There’s a lot of great details on these rings. The Powercast Dark clearly printed things well and
probably did its job perfectly, but there seems to be some porosity on this rings, so I’m guessing I
overheated the bronze. So these aren’t perfects castings… but don’t blame the resin for that.
I think it’s fair to say the resin printed as accurately as it claims.
The bronze might not look brilliant here, but trust me it will polish up
very nicely when I put the effort into it. So lets not call this a review, but rather
a quick look at Powercast Dark Castable resin and I have to say, I think it shows a lot of promise.
If Powercast update their settings, I’ll revisit be sure to show you some more examples.
But for now, I’ll jealously hoard it away…
So that’s it for this video guys. Take care and thanks for watching.