You can buy Sylgard just about anywhere. At the moment, prices for Sylgard are high, as there seems to be a worldwide shortage of Silicone elstomers.
The best price I was able to find was at Ellsworth for $109. Here is a link:
Remember, a 1/2Kg of Sylgard will yield about 7 tanks, max for a Form 1 standard tanks, assuming you do them all at once. The average Form 1/1+ tank will take ~65-67g. The ZVat takes about 56-58g.
If coating Form 2 tanks, those are about 105-108g, so you’ll only get about 4 tanks out of the Sylgard container.
There are other alternatives to Sylgard as well which are cheaper, such as ML Solar, or Qsil 216. In fact Qsil is about $40 for 1 LB of the stuff.
Last but not least. Don’t buy now thinking that you’ll recoat sometime in the future. This stuff has a shelf life of about 2 years from the date of manufacture, after that it will not cure properly. So make sure you check the date of manufacture and use it before it expires.
Thank you for all that info. Never heard of Qsil… I will look further into that. Have you tried? What was the print quality? How cloudy does it gets?
Best
451, thanks for sharing your experience with ALW’s resins.
Another question for you, did you have any issues with tanks leaking during long 10+ hour prints when using ALW’s resin? Im thinking of buying their resins but now worry about having leaks and spilling onto or into the printer. Between prints, I do leave the FL resins in the tank and in the printer for weeks at a time.
I have not had any issues with LT tanks leaking but haven’t had ALW resin in them over really a month yet. What I have had an issue with is FL LT resin tanks while more expensive and supposedly lasting longer are much more unforgiving with scratches or impacts (caused by miss prints) issues with adhesion to the build plate. I literally have an LT tank now with a gouge in it that I’m sure was caused by a piece that came off from the build plate plastic. But was told by CS that it looked like a spatula gouge from me using the sharp vs round edge spatula.
Im no idiot and did use the corner spatula not the round edge one but definitely didn’t try to use the corner of the spatula to remove the failed print from the LT tank.
So while they seem to last longer if you impact that layer in anyway consider it trashed after and FL not replacing it.
That being said I’ve got about 6 cracked. PDMS coming up, or bubbling Standard resin tanks. A few were replaced by FL so I can’t complain too much about there level of customer service for the Standard tank issues.
The prints I did lasted for up to 35h, since it was on open mode, I could not always refill in time so it added to the original 26h prints I was doing.
I started to have leaks at the end of the second print, so I’d say it took about 70h before leaking. You’ll start seeing the PDMS layer lift at the refilling corner at about 30h. What you can do, like the ALW guy told me, is to litteral glue that corner with silicon glue. I’d do that before pouring the resin though.
But if you let the ALW resin sit in it for weeks, it will flow right out.
So. I made a little cost comparaison. I limited the types of resins to the three resins FL and ALW share, being the Grey Resin / Grey Resin, Rigid Resin / Black Resin and the Flex Resin.
I made one comparaison for 10L being used and another with 50L being used, so we can see how the gap widens when we use more resin.
For FL, we just have resin and tank costs. For the ALW, we have the resin, the tanks (from Z-Vat), the silicon and universal cartridge for the ones who want that.
As a quick conclusion, FL’s print cost is about twice as much as ALW.
This is an image he shared. Don’t pull it, it will make things worse. Just do like if you were dealing a glass window, make a nice round corner along the edges. You don’t need to go all around, only the filling edge and go along most of the right edge will suffice.
Many of you are writing about mixing resins together to achieve decent results. I am new to the subject of non-original resins. I am looking for replacements due to the ridiculous prices of the originals. I have two questions:
is mixing the resins together necessary to get a good result?
Do these resins work well with Form3L? In the characteristics sheet of ALW resins it is written only about Form 2.
Mixing requires a lot of experimentation. If you buy ALW resin or another compatible resin then you don’t have to experiment yourself to get consistent results. For a Form 3L you’d need a universal cartridge from ProtoART to print.
