Hey guys, 3D resin printing is great, but the downside
is cleaning a curing, so I thought today I’d share a few simple techniques I use to help
make life a little bit easier. I first started off cleaning my prints by
swilling them around in IPA and whilst this works, I found thorough cleaning was problematic.
Then I got my first Wash & Cure machine and I was stunned by the difference – so much
easier and so much cleaner. But unfortunately, these seem to really use a lot more IPA, which
increases costs. For that reason I’ve shared with you my
easy technique for recycling IPA, but here’s how I use it to maximum effect.
With my prints fresh off the printer, I’ve found a very useful practice is to quickly
blast away excess resin with a spot of air. I concentrate around detail areas and the
supports as this is where resin builds up. This is an optional step but it does help
considerably. This is a cheap and cheerful airbrush with
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 prints for just a
few seconds, even in dirty IPA, is an excellent way to remove 90% of the uncured resin.
Now at this point I’m frantically looking for my tongues which I didn’t find until
later, so don’t please don’t make the same mess I do here.
Now you’re good to use your Wash station as normal. This is the Elegoo Mercury X I
reviewed a few days ago. The IPA inside is recycled, but it’s fairly clean. I give
the prints a spin for two minutes and let the impellor 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
removal of the bulk the supports. Once this is done, I’ll clean again.
The problem is, however, with supports removed, prints are often 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 swill method, 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 maximise 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 I’m just trying
to rid myself of the bulk of the resin. For Stage 3 washing, I want nicely cleaned recycled
fluid. And when it comes to this next stage, I want IPA to be at least as clean, if not
a little cleaner, and that’s what’s in this container here.
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 vibrations 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
an 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 makes an incredible difference, probably better than a wash and
cure I personally think, and in many ways it’s better as there’s no risk of damaging
fragile prints. However, one quick and very important safety
note here. Ultrasonics like this heat up the liquid. They take a 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 a 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
let them drip dry. Personally I’ve 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 finger
nail UV lamp and a cardboard box covered in foil, and this approach does work, but the
Curing Station makes life so much easier and again I love the Elegoo Mercury X, with its
slow turntable and 3 UV light arrays. But I think we can improve on this by redirecting
all those stray UVs. The cardboard box gives us a clue and a look
at this reflective surface on the Anycubic Wash and Cure Plus reinforces this.
It turns out one of the few things that reflects UV well is Aluminium, so ordinary kitchen
foil is ideal. A bit of cardboard, glue and double-sided
tape helps us improve the efficiency of our Curing Station. I can’t promise it will
make a discernible 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 Archvillain Games, printed on the Phrozen Sonic 4K using Phrozen 4K Aqua Grey
resin. Other than a little tidy up of 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 and simple, especially if you’re
prepared… which I clearly wasn’t here. But you get the idea.
So that’s it for this one guys. I hope you found something useful here.
Take care and thanks for watching.