Hello can we mix classic resin dye in the durable resin to get the durable black resin ???
Some users have had successes using dyes for nylon/acrylic/acetal like RIT’s DYEMORE products.
Given the price of the dye I think it’s worth taking a bit of resin and see if it dyes correctly, then try printing with just a few mm in a tank instead of dyeing a whole cartridge.
Don’t hesitate to give a feedback if you try this ! I’m also interested, I just ordered Rit DyeMore Graphite to try making Tough V4 black or at least darker and somewhat opaque.
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Would love to know if you guys try this and what happens. I have a Durable and will attempt to use some color pigment on it. My goal is to make a “tan” color in Durable. Very interested in seeing results!
I have had successes dying already printed resin with Rit DyeMore, but haven’t tried to mix different dyes to get a certain color. If you are thinking about the dyes in the color kit from Formlabs, I don’t think you can mix it with other Formlabs resins since it’s made to “complete” the base resin in the color kit and thus might add some unwanted stuff to an already “complete” resin formula.
This week I tried to mix formlabs white die with durable. I mixed it at 50ml color / 1000ml of resin. Parts look good. Print one was good printing at 0.1mm height, Print 2 at 0.05mm failed. 24hrs later the resin began the become more of a gel consistency. print 3 and 4 have layer adhesion problems 2 failures out of a 16 part print. 48 hrs later. Resin is still gel like and parts end the printing process feeling like jello (must softer vs virgin durable) and only semi cured by the laser. After uv/heat cure for 60mins@60c they feel fully cured like normal.
EDIT: it actually took 2 cure cycles at 60mins@60c after the mix has sit for 24 hrs. The first print was fine with one cure.
Video of it wiping, you can see an adhesion problem on the top right.
If mixing color maybe try to run in open mode with small batches. I wouldn’t recommend dying a full container.
I will be trying a open mode print later today.
Sorry for the ramble just wanted to get it written down before I forget.
Interesting ! So that seems to confirm that it messes up with the resin formulation. Have you tried dying liquid resin with dyes suited for dying plastics like Rit’s DyeMore ? There are others on the market too. I would bet that a 5% mix would be sufficient to get a good coloration and might not mess up the resin formulation as much as Formlab’s dyes ?
I only tried the durable with form’s color kit, and now there is a durable shortage… so I haven’t tried open mode. I started getting 50% failure rate started after 36 hrs of mixing so I called it quits on that experiment.
You should be able to use Smooth-On So Strong dye with Durable. I’ve been successfully printing Durable with relatively high concentrations of white, flesh, and brown So Strong for a few months now with very very few failed prints and those are about as opaque as that line gets. Black might be tougher, but you should be able to start with lower concentrations of black and find a concentration that works for you.
The only issues I’ve encountered is you might need to post cure for longer than normal.