When you think of making something out of silicone, you usually think of using a mold and injecting it with the material. Can you 3D print it? [Kimberly Beckett] answers that very question in a recent post. The short answer is yes, but you need specialized printing equipment.
Most consumer or hobby printers use either filament deposition or photoresin. Neither of these processes are good for printing silicone. For one thing, silicone doesn’t melt and reform like a thermoplastic. After all, that is why we like making hotend socks and oven utensils with the material. If you do melt silicone, you get a gooey mess, not a nice fluid you can push through an extruder nozzle. As for resin printing, silicone is resistant to UV so the chances of coming up with UV curable silicone are pretty small.
So how do you print silicone? There are a few methods. Aceo is a technique that is sort of like an inkjet. It deposits a solution of silicone and a binder that activates on exposure to UV. After placing a layer, a UV light activates the binder and you repeat for the next layer. There is also a technique for drawing a layer of silicone liquid and then curing it with a halogen lamp.
There are several companies that make photosensitive resins that mix with silicone. The resulting print is resin impregnated with silicone. A trip through an oven can burn away the resin and leaves a silicone part. Some companies offer this as a service and others make resin for high-end printers.
Of course, you can always produce a mold with your 3D printer and then use that mold to create a silicone piece in the conventional way. Or, you can go full injection molding on the cheap.
The link to Kimberly Beckett’s post is bogus (just points to your WP admin login)
Strange. Try now.
i think this was the link https://3drific.com/can-you-3d-print-silicone/
Just make a really slow 3d printer and extrude normal silicone in caulking tubes… It’s not exactly rapid, but it seems like the easiest solution in the meantime
Regular tube based silicone takes far too long to cure.
3D printing doesn’t necessarily mean rapid prototyping
It needs to at least partially cure between layers otherwise following layers will mess up the previous ones once the mass exceeds the materials specific strength
Simple. Time… Lots of time
In effetti potrebbe andare ma dovrebbe essere silicone acetico con alto disagio che contribuisce alla solidificazione rapida
That’s an interesting point, and maybe there’s a way to accelerate the curing process! It’s using exposure to water vapor, right?
Ooh I’m finding some references saying that a too-humid environment can flash-cure the surface layer which blocks the watre vapor from getting to the deeper parts of the material, meaning thicker RTV silicone parts might not cure fully. Sounds like a slam-dunk, just print thinner than that skin depth and run a humidifier as your “print cooling fan”…
You can accelerate curing by mixing corn starch into the silicone. This can also be used to make a moldable putty similar to Sugru.
There are also platinum cured silicones that aren’t too hard to get. Many hobby / craft stores have them if online shopping isn’t an option for you.
I did this to prototype some devices. However, the stench of acetic acid, which is a byproduct of the curing was pretty strong. The corn starch also promoted bacterial/fungal growth, so I stopped using it.
Some don’t evolve acetic, some evolve methanol (which isn’t corrosive to metals, if you’re aiming to pot electronics)
I don’t know if you used too much starch or I just got lucky but I have a few examples of it that are going on 10 years old with no mold growth.
Substitute talcum powder for corn starch, and it works just the same without wanting to mold.
why not just print standard premixed silicone ‘underwater’ with a support liquid of similar specific gravity to prevent slouching.
I imagine very long bridges would work reasonably well
https://www.momentive.com/en-us/categories/elastomers/uv-cure-silicone-rubber
https://www.novagard.com/novagard/uv-curable-sealants/
https://www.ellsworth.com/products/adhesives/silicone/henkel-loctite-5055-uv-curing-silicone-adhesive-1-l-bottle/
binary coded fingernail: Left hand 0xB or 0xD, right hand 0x6
The are 2 areas of repair where this may be a breakthrough. Silicone keyboard contacts in synths which come in all shapes and spacing and something better than rubber surrounds on speakers that rot and ruin an otherwise good set of speakers.
You can buy if curable silicone https://www.ellsworth.com/products/adhesives/silicone/henkel-loctite-5055-uv-curing-silicone-adhesive-1-l-bottle/ nice and cheap
Formlabs makes a silicone-like resin. They have Shore 80A and Shore 50A flavors: https://formlabs.com/materials/flexible-elastic/