Well I would call this profile a success. I have been trying for quite a while now searching for a recipe that will produce optical clarity. The CNC Kitchen video had me skeptical because truth be told, his results aren’t that impressive.
This is what I was able to achieve last night during an 8 hour print. I used Sequence by Object print function so that each of the two objects were printed in sequence thus ensuring minimum head pickup. The first object was a 25mm cubed primitive, the second was a 5mm thick by 60mm diameter disc primitive.
I cheated a bit in that I sanded both using graduated wet sanding starting at 240 grit and worked up to 1500 grit. Then after I removed as much of the layer lines that I could, I then hit it with a polyurethane clear coat spray paint. Again, what I was trying to achieve was optical clarity through the media itself, I can always do some type of vapor smoothing if need be but I wanted to try mechanical means first.
You be the judge. Would you categorize these as optically clear?
Now I still have not been able to get the nozzle lines out of the print but in fairness, I haven’t really optimized for that yet. What I was trying to prove was, is it possible to get optical clarity using transparent media.
This is what they looked like before they were taken off the plate. The plate was a smooth High Temp Bambu plate with two coats of Aquanet mainly to act as a smoothing and release agent.
You can see that the although both the cube and the disk were using the same profile, the disk took on a milky appearance that I was not have to get out.
Which surprised me to tell the truth. I say that because I produced a similar 30mm disc, in fact it was the same disc in the same profile just scaled. Yet that smaller disk was totally transparent after just a modest amount of sanding and polyurethane.
I will repeat this process with the disk only but I want to first dry the filament overnight just to make sure that moisture isn’t contributing and then I want to print it using concentric fill pattern. My hopes are that this might force the nozzle to behave more like spiral vase mode.