Curing LARGE parts without tilt mechanisms
Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 10:22 am
So,
The other day (8/12/2014) steve and JJ and guanu and I were talking about printing LARGE parts with a resin printer, and the difficulties with tilting a vat of platform with a large surface area.
Then
....
Steve came up with the idea of curing 'sections' of the layer one at a time, with a lift sequence between, so that the surface area of the cured resin that is trying to stick to the vat would be minimal. Effectively the sticking force would be minimized by only curing a small section of the layer at a time. Instead of curing a whole 100 square mm layer in one 'shot' why not cure 5-20 sqaure mm areas each, which would have the effect of 20% of the sticking force of the one large part! Then, we came up with concentricly offsetting the perimeters of the parts inside themselves, so that the last 'layer' or cured area would be the outermost section of the print, that way theres no blending or visible blemishes from the multiple cured areas. So imagine rings of a tree, with a software setting to specify the maximum square area to allow to be cured at once, and the software would generate 'rings' around each part, up to the max surface area, and print those areas before moving up to the next layer
That, is a good idea right there,
Thoughts???
The other day (8/12/2014) steve and JJ and guanu and I were talking about printing LARGE parts with a resin printer, and the difficulties with tilting a vat of platform with a large surface area.
Then
....
Steve came up with the idea of curing 'sections' of the layer one at a time, with a lift sequence between, so that the surface area of the cured resin that is trying to stick to the vat would be minimal. Effectively the sticking force would be minimized by only curing a small section of the layer at a time. Instead of curing a whole 100 square mm layer in one 'shot' why not cure 5-20 sqaure mm areas each, which would have the effect of 20% of the sticking force of the one large part! Then, we came up with concentricly offsetting the perimeters of the parts inside themselves, so that the last 'layer' or cured area would be the outermost section of the print, that way theres no blending or visible blemishes from the multiple cured areas. So imagine rings of a tree, with a software setting to specify the maximum square area to allow to be cured at once, and the software would generate 'rings' around each part, up to the max surface area, and print those areas before moving up to the next layer
That, is a good idea right there,
Thoughts???