SLA (Stereolitography) 3D printers rely on liquid resin that is being solidified with the help of UV light (Laser, LED or DLP light source), however when the finished print is ready to be removed from the build plate it still needs some more work. The first step is to clean it up with the help of stong alcohol that will remove any liquid residues from the resin, then you might need to remove some support material if you needed it. You would notice however that the 3D printed part has a bit of rubbery feel and is not yet like a strong plastic, so it needs to be cured with additional UV light to become strong. One of the most common and easy ways to do it is to bring out the 3D printed part outside so the sun can shine on it and cure it in a few minutes, however this is not the best way to do it and the sun is not always available when you need it to provide enough UV light.
We have experimented with different sources of UV light to see if we can easily cure 3D printed parts on our new XYZprinting Nobel 1.0 SLA 3D printer. We’ve started with a 3W UV LED lamp from a flashlight, but that was simply not powerful enough an even after an hour the test parts were still not cured well enough. Then we have moved to UV lamps for checking for counterfeit money, these are usually available with a 4-8W UV lamps and are pretty easy to find, but unfortunately they were still not powerful enough. So the next step was a string of UV LED lights where we got about 8W of power per meter and this meant that we needed quite a long strip to get more power out of them and we have moved to looking for alternatives. The next thing we have tried was a 36W nail polish curing UV lamp – these are available in different forms from about 9W to about 48W, but the 36W model seems to be quite common and cheap to get. It uses four 9W CCFL UV lamps and apparently provides enough UV light in order to cure most 3D printer parts in just a few minutes. It has worked really well with the clear resin prints from the Nobel 1.0 SLA 3D printer and there is enough space to fit inside relatively large objects. If you need more space you should be able to pretty easily modify the standard plastic box and make a larger size box with some aluminum foil.
Features:
1. Applying new LED lamp beads, sufficient illumination and good printing effect
Specifications:
Light source: LED
Material: PCB
Size: 40*40mm/1.57*1.57''
Power: 40W
Applicable: for SLA/DLP 3D printer
Notes:
Please allow 1-3cm differs due to manual measurement.
Due to the different display and different light, the picture may not show the actual color of the item. Thanks for your understanding.
