From Maker Faire – Will Ware: Home made stereolithographic printer in a plastic bucket! #3DThursday #3DPrinting

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Was a surprisingly successful printer for so modest the materials. Instead of filling the bucket with expensive resins, he floated the resin for printing on top of salt water — this trick stirred up quite a bit of interest. And he when I asked him what he was going to be doing with this printer next, he admitted that he has just been hired to start working for FormLabs — so he will be busy with less-homebrew solutions shortly! 😉

Will Ware: Homebrew stereolithographic printer:

…The past few weeks I have been spending way too much time trying to figure out how to build a stereolithographic printer of my own. I looked at a lot of things other people have done and started doodling some ideas. A few times I made or purchased parts for a particular approach and later realized that it wouldn’t work for some reason. But after a lot of tinkering, I finally produced the octahedron on the right.

My printer is pretty crude and is due for a lot of improvements in the days ahead. I had ordered a stepper motor controller board that didn’t work, so I needed to manually rotate the threaded rod that lowers the workpiece into the resin bath.

Hopefully this picture isn’t too confusing. A lot of this is stuff from the hardware store: a bucket, a lot of plywood, nuts and bolts, a piece of aluminum screen, a threaded rod, two straight rods. That black shape at the top held in place with a bungee cord is a pretty standard conference-room projector. When the thing is printing, the projector aims down into the bucket, which holds a quantity of resin floating on a much larger quantity of salt water. The ultraviolet light from the pattern projected onto the resin cures it in a particular shape, forming one layer of the product, and then the threaded rot rotates, moving the product down by one layer-height.

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2 Comments

  1. So cool !

  2. Well done Will!

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