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Fabrication Tip: UV cured resin

fabrication formicarium plastic uv resin

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#1 Offline Cypherf0x - Posted May 31 2016 - 12:55 AM

Cypherf0x

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Hot glue guns are a stable for many different types of fabrication.  I end up fabricating various things for work and there's a trick I've learned from some prop builders.  The resin used in SLA 3d printers is UV cured.  It turns into a hard durable plastic.  The kind used in printers is pretty nasty and you need gloves until you clean it in a rubbing alcohol bath.

 

Someone noticed this and developed UV cured resins that were faster and safer to use.  We use stuff from Dymax, but a consumer friendly version is called Bondic.  If you want to place a screen over a vent hole simply draw a circle of the liquid resin around it, press the screen material against it, position it to your satisfaction, and then hit it with the UV light to cure it.  It's nearly instant and is hard plastic so ants can't chew through it.  It's very handy for many types of repairs too.  It's available on Amazon.

 

The way we use resins is to have a powerful UV lamp on an arm that we can move around operated by a foot switch.  We wear safety glasses and have two hands free to position things before pressing the foot switch to turn on the light for a few seconds.  For smaller stuff we have UV flashlights.


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All of my working design files are on Github and final optimized 3d printed items are on my Thingiverse

If you need something 3d printed I'm on 3d Hubs

All of my designs are open source licensed under CC-Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International unless otherwise noted, but it'll be a rare exception.






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