Has anyone experimented with mixing resins, e.g. mixing flexible with clear?
Not yet, but was thinking the same. You don’t need a full tank to experiment, as long as there’s enough in the bottom to do a small print, you won’t waste too much. So far, I haven’t had time yet, but I was wanting to mix flexible with grey v2 or possibly black to get a little more suppleness to a snap-fit part I’m making. If you get a chance to try it, I’d love to here about your results.
I have done a 15% Flex and a 75% clear the results seemed promising but in the end it did not help much. I tried a couple different variants of mixtures from 50-50 all the way up to 15-75. The material comes out of the printer with what seems to be a lot of flex but over time the part gets extremely brittle the lesser amount of flex that I added the shorter amount of time it too for it to become too brittle. The other issue was at the 50-50 rating it did not form completely therefore I classified it as a failure. I started to get the form of part back when the mixture was about 30-70. Be sure to run this test in a resin tank you are okay with throwing out because the resin clean out was a bit of a pain in the a$$.
Good luck
Tom
@JoshK Did you ever calc the exopsure time for flexible? I do not have it in the spreadsheet you did. If you tell me the methodology you used to do these exposure timings, I can try to do the flexible.
@Thomas_Judy It might be that as the percentages change, so too must the apparent material selection in Preform. Clear has a fairly low exposure time, whilst flexible may be much greater, possibly causing the failure at 50/50.
The 50-50 Mixture was also run using the gray V2 Setting and had a failure as well I was going to look at running it in black but didnt have time. Might be something to venture into but not having specific exposure settings would help but to me its a shot in the dark without knowing the flex exposure which i cant seem to find.
I did the tests before flexible existed… In fact, I think castable had just came out very recently at that time. The method is described in the link below, but you will want to repeat one or two of my tests so you can determine a multiplier for your results. This will adjust for variables that are different for you.
ALSO - the first layer is drawn many times, the second is drawn only twice. I always photographed the second layer / set of laser passes. The huge amount of time it takes to do a peel cycle makes it easy to capture your photo without getting a third pass. So start photo during peel 1 and end photo during peel 2.
I have to admit being surprised; I would have expected the resins to mix relatively smoothly.
That said, I suppose the best evidence against that idea is that no one had posted success.
yikes - what an interesting method. I won’t be able to add flexible to the list as I do not have a camera unfortunately.
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