Just had some prints finish after a 9 hour run and it’s going on 7 PM. We are leaving in the morning to attend our youngest son’s college graduation MS degree. So, we won’t be back for 5 days.
I wanted let the castings drip overnight to get as much excess resin off them as I can. Then put them through the standard alcohol washes in the morning. After that I will wash them in water to get rid of any resin residue.
Normally I would then remove the supports and put the prints into a container of water to either sit out in the sun or go in the UV cabinet for hardening. But this takes a few hours, I really don’t have,
I’m wondering if the could be put in they water still with the supports attached and left there for 5 days without any adverse effects?
I would leave them in the machine until you have the time to tend to them. I have left prints in the machine over weekends and they have been just fine when I returned. In the machine they are protected from UV and the un-hardened resin will not harden. That’s just my experience. I would not leave them in water for days as they may absorb too much water and distort.
I’ll +1 to the idea: leaving parts in the printer is a great way to go.
To answer the original question directly, we’ve done some limited testing and published data on “solvent compatibility,” including water. After 24 hours exposure in water, standard resin parts experienced negligible weight or dimensional changes. Prolonged exposure (e.g. 24 hour test) in isopropyl alcohol has demonstrated noticeable changes in printed parts, unless they’re post-cured.
Thanks Stephen, that’s along the lines I was thinking but felt it was good to ask the question. I’m already 200 miles north and will be for the weekend. I left the parts on the build platform and as I generally do, I covered the printer with a large piece of satin cloth as a dust cover. I had this and similar pieces of cloth for backdrops for photographing small parts so the come in handy for other uses.
I’ll run the parts through the alcohol double bath, rinse with water, de-support them and cure under water Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning. I’ll report back how they did as I"m sure others would like to know in case they run into a similar situation.
I leave prints on the printer all the time. Kick off a run before I go to bed, it’s done in the morning but often times I won’t have any time to work on it until that evening. The only “negative” is that prints seem to be bit harder to pry loose if left on the plate for extended periods of time.
Randy, I too like to leave prints on the build pad hanging over night. Reason is to get as much of the excess resin off as I can and not have it in the alcohol bath. Works real well. I tend to schedule long runs so they end about 8 or 9 in the evening.
But this was rather extended time, five days to leave them hanging. Shouldn’t hurt but I felt it was best to ask. I was anxious to see how the printer turned out and that would have required cleaning them. I didn’t have the time to go through the hardening process so that was the reason for the question.
I’m working a different problem here in Michigan at or sons. Gave him my old Epilog TT24 laser engraver/cutter plus the computer I used to run it. Thought it would be easy to just hook back up… nope, can’t get them to communicate. Think it’s the ethernet cable but here in Kalamazoo, read that the boonies now, only place is Best Buy and that might as well be WalMart as far as any computer parts goes. I’ll have to drive around and see if anyone is having a yard sale, they do a lot of that here, maybe find the cable I need.
