Removing nylon powder off Pa12 prints using this tool saves a lot of time, breaks the powder down to smaller particles, helps with hand fatigue, and makes the overall process more enjoyable. You can also, on simple flat parts, reduce the need to sand blast and can produce a bit of a polish to the surface. Recycles more material along with reducing the powder contamination in your sandblaster medium.
18v Ryobi compact power scrubber with black brush-Hard Bristle Power Scubber Brush RPBB152H (note the supplied brush heads, green, blue are too soft).
The unit is sealed so that the powder cannot penetrate. Have used it for a year with no issues. I was concerned about static and overheating as it’s a sealed unit, but it doesn’t seem to be a problem. Just give it a rest between charges.
We use it in the older fuse depowdering station, so the powder is contained as the wheel can fling the powder around.. We also use a 3m versaflo Respiratory Hard hat with filtered air. It reduces fatigue and improves operator comfort when depowdering over long periods.
Versaflo is much more comfortable to wear than a P2 mask and blows clean air over your face. (similar to the welding masks)
All care and no responsibility taken. Do your own tests and due diligence. Safety-wise, wear a mask.
Good luck and happy depowdering.
I think it’s too big for the contained space on the sift which is a little small. We got the dremel versa and works great, hope to add he Versaflo soon because usually we spend from 3 to 4 hours cleaning parts and I agree on the fatigue aspect from a simple mask.
Hi, we have the old open face fuse sift and we postion the tool on its side, left hand side just above the round plate. In this position it spins towards the filter and we position the part to de-powder so it pushes dust towards the filter. so it stays pretty contained within the sift. I cannot understate the improvement in speed and user experience since we started using it. need to use the black hard bristle as the blue and green are to soft.
Tip - use the blue and green heads to clean your shower as its waterproof
Its a game changer, worth a go just remember to purchase the black stiff bristle.
They have changed the design of the bristle (removed some hairs but should work the same)
Hi Matt,
we have an open face sift so we try to avoid blowing the powder around.
Some residual powder is still attached to the surface which is harder to remove. The sand blaster cleans this up. This tool with the hard black bristle on flat parts can remove this step as also buffs the surface.
Hi Mario,
we use it on its side on the left hand side of the sift. With the 150mm (6inch) head is very fast at removing the bulk of the material and surprisingly it also seems to get into the corners pretty well. Being water proof it doesn’t become contaminated with powder.
We did think of using an airtool but the noise/speed put us off this one seems to have the correct rpm for the disc size and the trigger locks on.
Do you have a picture? Seems like something similar I thought but didn’t think it could work. The Dremel versa is electric too low RPM and very compact,I only use air to take powder from closed cavities.
You could have a separate air blast chamber that you can collect the powder from the bottom that is what we do but we don’t save the powder at that point. it’s just to get the excess of before media but this could work as a collector just pour thru a filter.
How does this affect your your prints? I see that this method removes the surface armour. What Powder Refresh Rate are you using?
My method has been to just “smack” the the part to remove the powder save for the surface armour then transfer them into the Fuse Blast. and for the more delicate parts I print, I just “massage” the parts lightly before the transfer.
I am tempted by this method to try an and capture more used powder.
We also cleaned our components very thoroughly at the beginning. We were able to recover more powder with different brushes, but over time we noticed that some parts were more brittle than others.
This was particularly noticeable on parts with small spring elements. There were always an irregular number of parts where these elements broke.
Depending on the number of parts and their surface area, we fed different amounts of surface armor back into the powder cycle by means of thorough cleaning.
Even though the highest possible powder recovery is more cost efficient, we want to have the highest possible chance of a successful build job as well as consistent quality and material properties for both our components and customer components.
We have therefore now adopted the following workflow:
-We no longer have any brushes in the sift. We only remove powder from the parts with our fingers. We hold each part in our hands for a maximum of 20 seconds and only roughly remove the residual powder from the parts. In this way, the surface armor remains completely on the parts and is only removed during sandblasting. As a result, no sintered powder enters the powder cycle and it takes just 30 minutes to clean a full build chamber.
-After a print job, we vacuum up all the powder that has accumulated in the printer next to the build chamber over time. This powder remains there for a long time over the duration of a print job and is therefore also more heavily contaminated by the heating cycles and should therefore not be reused.
-The same applies to the powder that accumulates in the chutes on the left and right, under the flippers. This powder also accumulates there over a longer period of time and thus undergoes several heating cycles.
-After the sifting process, there are always larger lumps of powder remaining on the sift mesh. These are also vacuumed off and not pressed through the mesh. Only powder that falls through the mesh on its own is used.
In principle, we make sure that only powder that has seen a maximum of one reheating cycle through the quartz tubes is reused.
Our Fuse1+ already works extremely reliably for us with more than 95% successful print jobs.
Now, however, the components from a print job are also extremely reliable and consistent.
Whereas before we always had to test all parts individually to sort out the occasional brittle part, now all parts are consistent and we no longer need to sort out parts.
For a full build you usually need different qty of material into the hopper, but lets say you need 6-8 kg per buildchamber. How much of this powder you calculate is lost running this process(which makes a lot of sense) The theory says that if you sinter 2kg from an 8kg build you will be recovering almost those 8kg however with what you propose the qty could be as low as 4 kg.
It is true that we recover less powder than is theoretically possible, but we do not lose several kilos per print job.
It is usually only a few grams per component. Of course, this depends on the component, whether it has holes, ribs, etc. where powder cannot be removed so easily.
I can show you an example and measure the difference in weight during our next print job.
A certain amount of powder is also lost after a print job due to the printer’s output.
In our opinion, the costs between cleaning as effectively as possible, occasionally sorting out parts and faster and more reliable post-processing are well balanced. If thinner components break later on and we have to supply replacements, this can quickly become significantly more expensive.
There is a good presentation from formlabs itself on how to recover the powder as effectively as possible without spending too much time on it.
My problem is chronic lack of used powder, so I have made effort to recover as much as possible. Have any of you replaced your sieve in the sift? I am curious what criteria you used to determine it needed replacement. I need to brush mine off after every couple chambers or so, perhaps more frequently than that even.
Hi, we run the standard 30 percent for the thicker parts.
If you have parts with snap fits or small or thin parts, you are better off running nearer to 100 percent. Unfortunately, not one solution fits all designs.
