I’m hoping there are some people in the community already familiar with some ‘rogue’ (non Formlabs) resins…
For my parts, I need them to perform at -40°C to 150°C – which is very aggresive but achievable with an available, albeit expensive, resin called Accura Bluestone.
I’ve done some digging and found out SLA machines which use this resin have:
Wavelength: 354.7 nm
Wattage: 1000 mW
Compared to the Form1
Wavelength: 405 nm
Wattage: 120mW
What are the chances the Bluestone would work? With respect to wattage, maybe the speed of the laser could compensate for the low wattage. And the wavelength of activation is maybe close enough?
Or maybe I’m just too hopeful.
I think that resin won’t work at all. It is most likely designed for the old SLA systems that use very powerful lasers to cure (or in this case cook) the resin.
I’ve been looking into some different resins, try funtodo.net for a few of them, I also understand that with the specific laser there are others too, the engineer I got mine from pointed me to makerjuice where he got his supplies I believe.
To be honest, I would print a mold and cast it with a high performance casting resin. Depending on shape you can just print a female mold. For complex shapes that would die lock you can print a plug and make a mold with silicone.
Casting parts from printed molds is probably the best way to get improved performance (temperature or durability). Also, many of the casting materials will be fairly UV stable.