Ideas for lasers and resins

[glauco]

Well I just got back from vacation in Brazil, and man you have a beautiful country!!!! I live in the coldest city in the world (Winterpeg), and when my car isn't falling to rusty pieces I can drive down to my local hemp processing plant and pick up hemp oil at 1$ per liter! Sure beats the priciing of 50-100$ per liter on some of the resins I find.

Hey amir, I'm glad you enjoyed my country! I'm not a traveller guy, but if you live in Brazil, you can't go too far from your home without facing beauty nature.
To get hemp oil in Brazil, you would pay $50 per liter and need to have hope to not have the Federal Police to deliver personally in your home... you really go to the jail. As I'm just a poor latin american guy, I would rest in jail as a "dangerous guy" for at least 6 years for International Drug Traffic. Imagine that

[Londonship]

More than two years on, and I am wondering if you ever were able to produce some edible or soy oil based materials that was able to be catalyzed forming some new materials.

[amirjabri]

I'm pretty sure linseed oil is FDA approved food safe when used as a sealer on wood. I think linoleum must be ok but I'll have to check, but it is pretty much just linseed oil.

[Anuvin]

Haha Feign said exactly what I was thinking.

So, all we need is the right oil and the right catalyst? What did you have in mind for a catalyst? What do you need to test this? Will the resulting product has properties like linoleum?

Very cool stuff! Can't wait to hear more, please share anything you think up!

[amirjabri]

Haha Feign said exactly what I was thinking.

So, all we need is the right oil and the right catalyst? What did you have in mind for a catalyst? What do you need to test this? Will the resulting product has properties like linoleum?

Very cool stuff! Can't wait to hear more, please share anything you think up!

Ok well I'm still not 100% sure, but I've found some articles where a manganese catalyst (non toxic - its used in vitamin pills) was used instead of the regular cobalt/lead combo (very toxic!). I will dig up the reference today but they found photocatalytic properties of manganese catalysts for polymerizing the flax oil. Its not exactly that simple as you have to pre-oxidize and pre-polymerize the oil by heating it in air to accelerate the polymerization process. I was planning to buy pure virgin flax seed oil, hemp oil, tung oil, soybean oil, grapeseed oil among other oils, and test them unmodified and with different amounts of oils, pre-treatments of heat and/or air, and catalyst (I will try heating up the oil with manganese chloride to see if it reacts and dissolves to make my catalyst mixture. I know if you start out with a highly viscous treated oil then it polymerizes faster, but that might ruin the print quality. That's why I want a stronger laser beam to speed it up hopefully so you can print with virgin oil. I hope this information helps, I'm still talking out of my ass as I have the manganese and laser on order, and I only have some of the oils I need to test. I also need to compare with commercial resins, and I may mix up a batch of home-made cheap acrylate, epoxy, and polyester resins just to save money compared to buying commercial ones. Again I haven't sourced the materials but I may beg the local chemistry department to borrow some of the chemicals in small quantities.

[Feign]

I don't know about eating it outright, but being able to make food-safe items opens up a lot of possibility. Currently plenty of people are making chocolate molds and other food-contact items with regular plastics and disregarding the health problems that can cause, but I'd rather not risk it.

Also, Linolium is some pretty tough stuff, even without the green aspect, it seems like a desirable print material.

[amirjabri]

I don't know about eating it outright, but being able to make food-safe items opens up a lot of possibility. Currently plenty of people are making chocolate molds and other food-contact items with regular plastics and disregarding the health problems that can cause, but I'd rather not risk it.

Also, Linolium is some pretty tough stuff, even without the green aspect, it seems like a desirable print material.

What about using a silicone mold made from the print? Couldn't something like this work for food and not be a problem?

http://www.instructables.com/id/Make...ehold-materia/

[Feign]

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.

[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.

[Feign]

I've actually used the silicone molding method in that instructable. Naptha and clear silicone caulk makes for a great 2-part mix. I never thought of it for printing since the combination isn't UV reactive, and I've not known any way to make it UV reactive.

What kind of catalyst to oil ratio would you be starting with? Tung Oil seems to be dirt cheap, but in America Curcumin is being sold as a wonder drug... At wonder drug prices.

If it only needs a little bit of the catalyst, then this could end up being a very affordable resin, even compared to MakerJuice.