Ideas for lasers and resins

[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]

Actually this looks very healthy. Printing food!! If these kind of experiment works, I would try even hemp oil because is the most healthy thing in the world... but not here in Brazil, it is forbidden to have hemp of any kind...

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.

[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.

[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.

[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

[amirjabri]

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

No worries, if I was in Brazil I would try using Tung oil, which is apparently produced there in large quantities. Tung oil can be treated almost identical to acrylic resin, or be mixed with it to make it more renewable. The same catalyst should work with tung oil so if you have an interest try it out! I'm still figuring out how to work with linseed oil, which is more complicated. Good news is most alkaline batteries are full of manganese dioxide, zinc, and potassium hydroxide! These are three ingredients I can use to make a catalyst for linseed oil 3d printing hopefully and I find kilos of dead batteries in the recycling of my own apartment building!

[amirjabri]

Geez this tread is turning into my chemistry notebook I'm really sorry: A few things we can talk about are photocatalysts and monomers (resin). One interesting photo-catalyst known is curcumin, which is a bright yellow dye extracted from tumeric. It has been shown to be a good natural non-toxic photocatalyst for polymerization. Here is some of many references:

http://www.rpitechnology.com/attachm...0_Mkt_Lead.pdf

http://www.researchgate.net/publicat..._and_mechanism

They used a synthetic monomer but others such as Tung oil may work well instead. Would be interesting to see if pure tung oil mixed with curcumin could give a 3d printing resin. It is considered food safe when cured. I'm also interested in using Curcumin with manganese to make a photocatalyst for linseed oil. I found out you can make a good extract of curcumin from tumeric or buy it, then you can use manganese to make a complex using this procedure. It is similar to another manganese photocatalyst which is proven to work well for linseed but this one is also non-toxic!

Here is the procedure I found, but I'm sure an easier one can be made:

Curcumin manganese complex, CpCpx. Manganese ace-tate (0.165 g, 0.65 mmol) was dissolved in ethanol (1 ml) and heated at 60°C . Curcumin (0.240g, 0.65 mmol) in ethanol (15 ml) was added drop-wise to the solution of manganese acetate and the reaction mixture was allowed to reflux for 3 h. The solid obtained was collected by filtration, washed withcold ethanol and dried at room temperature to afford red powder (0.150 g, 54.55% yield).

[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]

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]

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.