ReCoating Resin Vats - DruckWege

Dear all,

we followed a lot of the discussions from damages of the silicone layer in resin vats from SLA printers that cause impacts on the UV light transmission and resulting in print defects.

However, we also went through these experiences and we were looking for DIY solutions, since buying constantly new vats was causing to high O+M costs for us.

As we figured, that premixing of reactants, such as Sylgard and others, and the purchase of raw materials, at least here in Europe, is not that easy, also resulting in extra cost for minor material charges. However, We developed a convenient product as a Repair Kit (including a primer between the ReCoat and vat to counter tensile forces during the print process) for repairing resin vats of SLA printers and just initiated a Kickstarter campaign: for the product and repair process. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/257551006/druckwege-recoat

We would be glad to receive your thoughts on that.

Best regards,
DruckWege

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@Anton_G Well at first this is great! There is one thing that irritates me though. It is told by formlabs and already widely known by most members that cleaning the resin tank like you are suggesting will end up in cracked pmma surfaces! You should make clear that the IPA does not harm PMMA or offer a save alternative.

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Hey MarcusKnorr, thanks for pointing this out. Oddly we didn’t experienced this yet, the cracked pmma surfaces. BUT we also don’t say that you can refurbish a vat forever. We have figured that using our approach the vat can be refurbished at least 4 times.

We also have experienced the vats pmma surface going cloudy with a new vat on a failed print, where the laser was pointing for several hours on a small area. Of course if the vats surface is somehow damaged ReCoat won’t help either.

Nevertheless we reached out to our chemical specialist, to provide us some insight on the cleaning process, we are engineers, no chemists so we have to rely on him. As soon we get our answer, we’ll let you know.

Cheers,
DruckWege

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My grey resin tanks silicone layer is already starting to fog up so this soulds great! I’m just concerned about the cleaning process also. Ipa is said to attack the plastic which causes cracks. It’s pretty much impossible to get the tank 100% clean without using IPA though. Can these resin tanks not be made entirely of glass or something that can be cleaned with IPA?

Hey Edward_Peretti,

before and during the time we come up with recoat we didn’t experienced any issues with cleaning the vat with IPA. Maybe on the long run there might be issues, but i guess before that your vat is unusable due to the UV laser or physical stress.

So regarding the ReCoat kit, we think, you are pretty save to clean it for the recoating. If the vat is not damaged any other way, we can say there is no problem to recoat your vat at least 4 times *1. for the daily scrub of the bottom of the vat, maybe you should use the novuspolish, just to be sure (we haven’t seen the any problem with isoprop yet though…).

Regarding the glass, either it could be to dangerous to use it, imagine the base plate crushing into it, or it would last too long :wink:

Cheers

*1 edited “to at least”. This is our experience, we didn’t broke a vat till now. Will keep you updated.

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@Anton_G Thanks for sharing! Looking forward to get my hands on your kit.

Apparently causing some irritation here, sorry for that…

@Edward_Peretti have you seen this (Glass Tank). It seems to be feasable, but of course you would have to change the PDMS as often as with the acrylic tanks.

possibly because you joined directly after Anton_G and it looked like you wanted to just push his sales :wink:

ah yes the glass tank looks like a great idea. Though I want to see peoples experience with one before considering getting one.

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UPDATE
We worked out a solution and new feature of the ReCoat Kit which ensures less stress on the deposition layer with an adapted coating to reduce adhesion forces to the print model. This brings a novelty towards commonly applied coatings. please find further info on the campaign!

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