Silicone 40A printing. General impressions?

General Discussion
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Dear all,

I have been using a Form 3B for some years now, with Flexible 80A resin. Before, I also worked with Elastic 50A and Flexible v2 on a Form 2. We are using elastic resins for the design of porous materials and testing their mechanical properties.

We recently bought the Silicone 40A resin and I was wondering about the general impression from your prints. My major concern for these materials is the over-curing of parts (possibly associated with the transparency of the resins). We found out that some structures show clogged/overcured sections (this can happen both at the centre of the structure or at the edges).

Has anybody tried to print porous structures (or any other structure) with this resin? What are the general impressions/recommendations when using this material?

Thanks :slight_smile:

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We’ve had great success with printing buttons for headsets which have a tube coming off the bottom and attaching to the electronic sensor the key is get all the resin off which is best done with a small container filled with IPA in a sonic washer and after evert run get new IPA and repeat then when curing make sure you cure in a clear bowl of water it will get rid of most of the tack unless you want it tacky then cure it out of water.

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Considerations after the first prints:

  1. My porous structures are designed with self-made supports (in the form of pillars). Printing with silicone requires re-thinking of such supports. For the moment, I have overcome this limitation with automatic supports from PreForm.

  2. The pores of my structure are not printed consistently. It happens that one face of my cubic structure has clogged pores, while another face is properly printed (uniform pore dimension in the range of 320-510 um. The structures have porosity between 71% and 84%. The same prints with the Flexible resin would come out printed perfectly.

  3. I have printed the lattice kelvin cell provided by Formlabs as trial STL file, scaling it down to 1/4 of the original size (around 8 mm of cube edge). The features are finely printed, although the side which was on the build platform appears to be stiffer than the rest of the structure.

  4. After final curing in water with the Form Cure, the structures stick together and it is difficult to split them again without damaging them :joy:

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@pposabella Printing with Silicone Resin is undoubtedly a different experience than printing with our Flexible or Elastic Resins. Using custom supports is recommended. I have included the guide for Using Silicone Resin for you. For some more in-depth troubleshooting, our support team would be happy to work with you to find some solutions for your workflow. You can contact us HERE.

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