Recomendations from Siraya Tech Resin

[Hextra]

Siraya Tech had these interesting recommendations for curing their Fast non-Brittle resin. Several of these recommendations I've never heard anywhere else but I'm fairly new to this. The "replenish oxygen", contradictory timing for alcohol soak. and submerging in water during curing in particular caught my eye. Anyone else printing and curing like this?


From the Siraya web site:

Before Printing it is a good practice to stir resin in the vat and expose the bottom of the vat to air before printing. This replenish oxygen in the vat and helps reduce peel force.  

While the ideal printing condition for Fast is over 20C/68F, we have printed as low as 15C/59C as long as the bottom layers uses more exposure time

Recommended best support settings: We recommend medium preset support setting in chitubox for smaller prints. Heavy support for large prints on large printers. 

If you don't use chitubox, at least download a copy and see the detail settings for each preset and copy them over to your software of choice .

Cleaning:

Use a painter brush (or any brush made with hair) remove excess resins on the printed part with Use 95% concentrated Ethanol (preferred) or IPA to clean. Some form of methanol should work but make sure it does not contain acetone.

Do not submerge the parts in alcohol for more than 30 seconds.  After 2-3 minutes of cleaning action, remove alcohol with a hair dryer or air blower. For complex part with lots cavities, it may be a good idea to clean/dry multiple times.

User can check by touching the dried surface of the part to see if it is still sticky.  If the dried surface is still sticky, wash some more and dry again.

Post Curing:

Fast reached its optimal strength when the printed part is post-cured with UV after cleaned.  Use 395-405nm UV light and cure for about 5-10 minutes.

Make sure resin is completely cleaned off and there is no alcohol left (it needs to be dry) on the print before curing.

Curing by submerging object in water will significantly increase curing efficiency. Do not leave Fast prints in water for extended period of time (6hr). It may become very soft and need to be dried before using.


End of Siraya Recommendations

Hextra

[Steve.Wilson]

Some of that sounds a bit odd.  I'm interested because I'm starting my 3D printing experience with Siraya blu resin.  I'm going to observe some of the precautions about duration of exposure to IPA and cleaning, but if its sticky, that's more like uncured resin that should be cured by UV light.  I'll have a UV station with turntable for post-curing.

[zemerick]

Overall pretty standard stuff actually. The only notable one is the mixing oxygen into the resin to try and reduce the peel force. This is essentially the opposite of the curing under water ( which is actually a pretty well known trick, and I personally have been recommending for over a month. ), the idea being that oxygen inhibits the curing process. In the case of the water, this helps post curing because it blocks the oxygen from inhibiting it. They seem to be saying you want to get oxygen into the bottom of the vat so it doesn't cure to the FEP too hard, and that the resin touching the plate is already pretty much at capacity for the oxygen due to the plate having been out in the air, then pushing air down in with it. ( If the resin on the plate wasn't already oxygenated, then mixing wouldn't cause any difference. )

Not super easy to test the effectiveness, but it certainly could be worth looking in to more and passing around, thanks!

[Steve.Wilson]

I'm going to try the RainX trick to reduce peel force from the gitgo.  Such an easy thing to do.

OTOH, the process of doing *anything* to introduce oxygen into a vat full of resin sounds like a recipe for a nasty mess. 

All I think one would be doing is introducing air bubbles, which are unfortunately a heckuva lot more nitrogen than oxygen!