RepRap: Blog

By carefully folding the edge of the aluminium foil contact plate on the slide, I was able to form a reservoir for UV resin. This is the view from the USB microscope. You can just make out the array of dots on a 100μm grid on the slide below the dyed resin in the foil.

These were deposited with the Nichrome 80 tip. Here is a rather grubby micrograph of a 3x3 area with a hair next to it for scale. Unfortunately the hair oil got on the slide, and it blurs out some of the dots. More unfortunately the slide was not recoverable.

The dots of resin appear to be roughly 10μm in diameter. The purple blotch is a marker so I can find the damn things.

I cleaned the slide and ran again. The probe was a bit closer, so the dots were bigger, but I seemed to pick up a bigger resin load. This allowed me to not only make an array, but to use the dots to build up a square 300μm on a side. Horizontal rows all deposited with one dip in the reservoir. Had to tweak the colours and contrast to make it visible.

This was all done by manual control of the CNC interface, because I wasn't sure of the locations of everything and don't have code to adapt to using a reservoir yet. Also that Y axis is playing up again. However, this is quite the step forward.

# posted by vik-olliver @ 2:17 AM