Instead of using a bunch of filament for infill that can take a lot of time and in many situations make the objects suffer from strength because of the layer line orientation or just poor layer adhesion.
Is there any kind of product, like maybe I could just straight up use liquid resin meant for those types of printers and literally pour it in the body volume before the printer has a chance of putting a top sealing it up.
And either waiting a little bit or using the UV light to harden it a bit so it doesn’t slosh around while the bed’s moving when I restart the print.
While not ideal for models that need the target being lightweight, if that is not a concern and strength is or wanting it to be heavier, could this not only significantly reduce hundreds and possibly thousands of meters of filament from having to go through your extruder just by pouring in some kind of a liquid that will harden without expansion or shrinkage while you have it paused on the final layer before a top is put on?
Sometime in the last couple of weeks I saw something in one of my feeds about a new prototype printer someone had developed that used FDM to build a perimeter wall, and then injected UV curable resin for the 100% infill. It’s certainly doable manually using SLA resins. But…
These resins are kind of hazardous and they’re messy as hell if you spill them (I have a Form3 SLA printer). Manually pouring it in to a print on a build plate is going to be a challenge. And if you filled a large pocket of an FDM print with resin, you’re going to need a very high intensity UV light source to cure it in any reasonable amount of time. Direct sunlight probably won’t be nearly enough. These resins are designed to absorb UV and be cured in very thin layers. The UV doesn’t penetrate very well in to a deep pool of resin. Also, the resin gets hot when it cures. In a thin layer in a printer that doesn’t matter. Inside a FDM print, a big pool of the stuff might generate enough heat to melt/deform it.
The good news is, resins tend to be pretty viscous. Think “Maple Syrup”. There isn’t a lot to worry about, sloshing-wise, unless you’re filling right to the brim. Though if you were doing that, you’d fill the cavity with resin and then at a minimum cure the top few mms before resuming the print so it’d be self sealing.