We are trying to remove wet resin from the inside of a small tube right after the print gets off the printer. We have tried blowing through the hole using handheld compressed air canisters and our mouths. This is combined with five 3 minute baths in 70% ISO alcohol. We have also tried poking through the hole using a bent paperclip, which works for about half the curved tube, but gets very hard to push about 15mm into the curve.
Does anyone have any suggestions for removing wet resin from such a tiny hole?
A syringe filled with alcohol works great for us on channels smaller than 1mm. Only issue with this is scarring the still soft print with the tip of the syringe (or hypo) while trying to maintain a fluid tight seal.
Yeah, you can try a syringe or a pipette to run IPA through there. You could also get an ultrasonic cleaner and it might be able to do a better job, haven’t tested so I’m not sure if it makes a difference.
@Brandon_Andrzejewski Great idea! I tried the syringe, which seemed to work the same way that blowing it with our mouths did. Wish I thought of that before I got resin and IPA on my lips. Scarring doesn’t matter too much because we are going to sand the part down to smooth off the support bumps anyway.
@Zachary_Brackin I wish we had access to an ultrasonic cleaner, I would like to try that.
We did some tests with orientation and found that the lowest part of the curved tube to the floor is becoming clogged with cured resin. We tried 3 different orientations and each time the resin seems to be pooling at the bottom section of the tube because of gravity. Our solution right now is to snip off the part of the tube that is clogged, but that is obviously not ideal. Anyone else had this problem?
Cured resin makes me think you might have an optical issue, we manage to get clean channels at 0.9mm and the bottom of the channels (and commonly the full length due to capillary action) has uncured resin in it. An extension of your workaround would be to change your model to add a sacrificial feature to it that you can clip off later. I would still check out your optical path if you are seeing partially cured resin issues.