Hey guys,
As you know, I’ve now got this wonderful Elegoo Mars Resin Printer producing some phenomenal
prints… and with these prints I’ve been able to do some fantastic Lost Wax Casting.
But what about the Holy Grail of casting… Castable Resins…
Well I’ve reached out to a lot of companies that produce castable resins asking if I can
review their products, and Power Resins were very prompt to reply to me, sending me this…
their Powercast Burn...
Oh yes, castable resin… I’ve got goosebumps just looking at it.
Now I’ve been hearing that castable resins tend to have a bad name. Yes they’re costly,
but many people say they don’t work. Well I’m new to resin printing and I’m just
a novice caster, but I’m happy to give things ago.
Like I say, this isn’t cheap stuff, coming in at US $100 for 250ml. I could buy a whopping
12 bottles of the Standard Elegoo printer resin for the same price as 1 litre of Powercast
Burn.
There’s some useful information on their website including Printer Setting for many
different printers, though the Elegoo Mars isn’t one of them. But I’m sure that will
change quickly, and I’m certainly going to be providing the company with the settings
I’ll be using.
Power Resins say there’s no odour and I have to agree this is true. It’s certainly
very viscous, being quite thick and gloopy stuff.
The lack of data did cause me troubles and I don’t want to bore you with failures,
but I had several failed attempts with various settings before turning to my own Subscribers
for help. Of course they didn’t let me down and the solution was simple but critical…
Priming the Build Plate.
Again I tried a few methods but the easiest was this… dip a small brush in the resin
and spread this evenly across the plate. Keep it thin – as thin as you can manage. Let
it stand for 5 minutes so the brush marks seep together, then shove it under a UV light
for 10 to 15 minutes.
I wanted to be ambitious with my testing and some of you may recall Dick from Alaska. He’d
written and asked is I could have a bash at casting some scaled down Locomotive Build
plates comprised of tiny letters and numbers. I wouldn’t even be able to print something
that detailed with my FDM printer, but I figured a resin printer would easily be up to the
task. But would it cast?
I also fancied having another bash at my John Wick coin. The one I Lost PLA Casted was 2
inches in diameter. This time I wanted to have a go at halving that size.
A full build plate doesn’t slow down a resin printer in the same way as it would an FDM
printer, so I loaded the plate up.
Using the ChiTuBox slicer, I created a profile for the Powercast Burn and these are the settings
I used. As long as the build plate is primed, they work fine for the Elegoo Mars.
Printing time was around 5 hours and after leaving the prints to drip a short while,
I prised the prints free and washed them thoroughly with Methylated Spirits.
There’s no need to UV cure the Powercast Burn finished prints and a simple shake and
some air quickly dried them off. And they looked excellent. I couldn’t fault the print
quality. I cocked up the support positioning in a few places but that was nothing to do
with the resin.
Cutting away the supports was easy. The material is slightly more plastic-like than the Elegoo
Resin I’ve been using, but it cuts easily and could certainly be a little fragile, so
care is needed.
I cleaned up the edges with some very fine sandpaper and it was effortless. Very little
pressure is needed to ensure a nice flush finish.
I decided to keep some of the supports to act as sprues. To thicken them a little, I
dipped these in molten wax. This in turn helped me attach the prints easily to a wax sprue.
From here it’s just the standard investment casting you’ve seen me do before.
Investment plaster is mixed and poured into the flask. The flask then goes into the burnout
oven.
But hang on, there is another step needed here.
When wax melts, it becomes a liquid, just like PLA. So with Lost Wax and Lost PLA Casting,
the flask is placed into the oven button side down, so everything can seep out of the plaster.
As I used a wax spure, that’s what I did.
However, I understand that castable resin, when heated, actually becomes a gas. This
would become trapped in a button-down flask, so the flask needs to be turned button side
up.
As for me both positions were required, I went button down for an hour, then flipped
button up for the remainder of the burnout.
Notice that the plaster is fine. Some folks told me the plaster breaks up with castable
resins. Well that hasn’t happened to me yet, not with Powercast Burn at any rate.
Now this pour looks smooth enough but the casting gods had been mucking about just seconds
before. Again I’d lost all electrical power for a couple of minutes and everything cooled
too much for my liking. But things still went well.
I think you’ll agree, these castings don’t look too bad. Some of those letters are less
than 2mm tall and they can still be read. But things weren’t perfect. Some of the
edges were a little rough and some of the letters were partly filled with metal.
I had no choice but to try again.
This time I decided to introduce more thick support points around the patterns to act
as sprues, as well as plenty of usual supports. It makes sense to build in your sprues if
you can and the ChiTuBox software made this easy.
When it came to printing this time, I wasn’t so lucky. At some point the prints fell from
the build plate into the resin. So the print completely failed.
I reasoned that maybe the patterns were too heavy. So I primed the plate a second time.
And then again and again. Four times in total I did this, each time UV curing between coats.
And maybe four coats is overkill. Maybe two or three coats is enough. But that’s something
you’ll need to test for yourself. Since priming with four coats, I’ve had no printing
troubles at all.
Again look at the print quality. With good priming and proper supports, they’re as
good as I could hope for.
I think you’ll agree, these castings look even better than last time. The edges are
better and there’s no trapped metal in the lettering. For something so small, the quality
is excellent and every word and number can clearly be read.
Now these are going off to Alaska. I could tidy the edges a little better than I have
done here, but I know Dick is a skilled modeller with metalworking abilities that easily surpass
mine. He’ll be looking for precise sizing and on these circular build plates the edges
are bevelled, so I’ll leave the clean up to him. And some of you may think that sounds
like a poor excuse and that I’m just lazy – and you’d be absolutely right. Sorry
Dick.
But I did roughly true up the edges of these John Wick coins a little more and even gave
them a spin in the Tumbler to polish them a little. They’re certainly a vast improvement
on my last attempts.
This is the first time I’ve cast something that actually feels like a coin. It’s the
right size… it’s the right shape… it’s the right thickness… it feels like a real
coin.
To be honest, everything I’ve cast before seems like a hockey puck. But with castable
resin and a resin printer, it’s possible to make a coin sized coin.
So how did the Powercast Burn fair?
Well, perfectly really.
There’s an adhesion issue with the build plate which is probably caused by the weight
of the gloopy resin, but with effective priming this isn’t an issue.
The prints are excellent and could potentially be improved with finer layer heights and a
little fine tuning of the printer settings, but for me things were excellent as they were.
The resin seemed to burn away cleanly with no residue that I’ve noticed and there was
no obvious signs of plaster cracking or falling apart.
And the resulting castings were the most precise and detailed I’ve achieved so far – and
don’t forget I’m a self taught novice using largely homemade equipment.
Yes the resin is pricey, but it’s a specialised product with a limited market, so it’s sort
of understandable. How it rates against other castable resins in terms of price or performance
I can’t yet say. Hopefully as time goes on I’ll be able to review a few others.
But I can say that it performed perfectly in my tests. Give me a lifetime supply of
this and lock me in my workshop, and I’d be a happy man creating all manner of things.
In short – it did exactly what I wanted it to and did it well.
So there you go guys… Powercast Burn. It works.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this review, guys.If you want any more information, feel free to
drop me a line or maybe use the link that’s in the description below.
So that’s it for now guys. Take care and thanks for watching.