Ideas for lasers and resins

[amirjabri]

So you mentioned earlier that oils have to be pre-processed to make them viable for catalyzation into resin, I'm assuming this isn't something someone at home can just do with a sauce pan on a stove or we'd have resin recepies all over the place (While I have found one DIY photopolymer how-to, it had about twelve components and looked a whole lot more complex than what you're describing.)

Besides, vegetable oil and Cumin sounds more like the start of a good stir fry than a hard plastic.

Lol I was getting hungry thinking of it myself! I love curry! With linseed oil you need to pre-oxidize it to make it more viscous and full of peroxides so that when you finally zap it with light its ready to go. If you use virgin linseed oil it won't do anything unless you have a good catalyst. I was planning on using a small vial to test by heating up like 20ml of virgin flax oil in air (or using a fish tank bubbler to get air mixed in nicely). I will probably add some of the spent manganese dioxide from an alkaline battery as catalyst (not toxic I checked) to speed up this step. In a few hours it should get thicker because the polymerization has started. I don't want it fully cured though so I'll probably take some of the thickened flax oil and then see if a thin layer can cure with a 100mw 405nm laser. If it cures fast enough it should be usable for 3d printing!

In fact people have been making polymers for hundreds of years in cooking: they use flax oil to season cast iron cookware! In fact what they do is spread a thin layer of flax on bare iron, then they bake it to polymerize the flax and keep the surface from rusting.