RepRap: Blog

Dutch Guilding is used as a cheaper and more amateur-proof alternative to gold leaf. It's a form of very thin brass sheet, therefore conductive and non-edible. Although thicker and sturdier than real gold, it is still inadvisable to leave the book of it open on your desk when you turn on the air conditioning. Ask me how I know.

The hypothesis was that it would be possible to adhere guilding to the glass slide using deposited UV resin. Previous rough tests were inconclusive, though resin was observed on the resulting fragments of leaf.

I printed an 8x8 hollow square at 50μm spacing using Probe 9, allow a 25mm square of generic Dutch Guilding leaf to lay itself onto the pattern, and pressed it carefully with a loosely-wadded tissue. Then I pressed more firmly, taking care not to push sideways.

Finally, I transferred this to a UV lamp and cured the resin excessively.

The leaf is so thin that you can see the UV LED shining through. After carefully removing the fragile leaf with a camel hair brush, I found ... nothing.

A bit of a null result. I suspect that the resin adheres more strongly to the leaf than to the glass, and when I peel the leaf off, the resin sticks to that. This may be useful at some stage, but it isn't right now.

I did manage to make a test blob approx. 0.5mm diameter stick to the glass. This suggests that the force necessary to peel the resin off the slide for a given area needs to be greater than the shear force concentrated at the edge of the resin blob. The leaf then tears, and the resin remains on the glass. Maybe.

So basically, try bigger blobs (or more dense dots, or both). On the plus side, this should work somewhat better with actual gold leaf, as this is an order of magnitude more fragile than Dutch Guilding leaf.