Monday, April 21, 2025
UV Stage light for resin curing installed
After much mucking with magnets (just buy 30x10x3mm ones if you can) I've removed and replaced the Stage with the UV source in it (glowing futuristically in the image below). This required far too much faffing around with forceps and flying M3 nuts, so I have added captive nuts to the complementary axis mounting strips in the design.
The UV LED strip is soldered to curly wires with a 680R in series so that the 5V strip runs off the 12V Coolant Flow output from the RAMPS board and can be switched on/off with M8/M9. The curly wires reduce potential drag on the XY mechanism. There is a channel under the Stage Top layer to accommodate the leads, and the LED strip is secured in place with a small dab of hot glue just to make sure.
I've replaced the magnets that go on top of the slide with wide M8 washers because the new magnets are so damned strong using magnets on top was (a) overkill and (b) going to strain the XY Stage when you pull them off.
Now I have the physical separation and so forth sorted out I can play with timings to see how long I need to set the resin. With that sorted I'll make another batch of slides with resin reservoirs and we'll see if we can deposit a couple of layers.
Oh yes, those of you waiting for a set of printed parts, I'll be working on some mise en place STL files of parts for you while doing all that. Busy, busy.
