RepRap: Blog

Oh yes. Barely recognisable, resting on the sea bed at nearly 3 kilometres down...

Well, maybe not, but if you squint it looks like a Benchy sure enough. The wee beast was sliced on PrusaSlicer, and the GCODE slightly filtered to to 650μm long (1/100th scale) without extrusion and other GCODE commands that confuse the heck out of GRBL.

Next step was to load it all into CNCjs and fire up a couple of microscope views. Then the end of the 125/9 fibre was touched off on the glass slide just by eye, and raised I think 30μm:

 

Then a drop of nail art resin was deliberately dropped onto the fibre tip. The GCODE was run and the UV source manually turned on. The model tool 13hrs to print with 2μm slicing and 10μm/sec print speed. As non-printing movement speed was far, far higher, it was not necessary to switch off the UV source.

So controlling the UV with GRBL is probably a good idea - I missed the end of the print by 5 mins and kinda irradiated it a bit. Also the UV blasts through already printed parts and sets all the resin underneath. Diffraction Limited uses turmeric extract to fix that. I might do that, or use a UV-resistant marker pen ink.

I think the speed can be cranked up, and the layers made a little thicker. This'll speed the print. Ultimately and improved UV source and greater speed will help.

But overall the process is quite fast, quite easy to set up, and will allow me to print some serious parts even without the above modifications. 

I'll talk about the philosophy of moving to fibre/UV another time, it's kinda deep. I'll leave you with a picture of Benchy in progress. It's not easy, but you can just see bits of it inside the resin droplet just under the centre of the white fibre sheath.