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Re: Kevin's work

Posted: Thu Oct 12, 2017 10:09 pm
by CADjewelrySchool
Wow. Great design, cast and finish.
Has your casting house cast SolusCAST before?
Could you explain your curing process before sending off for casting?
Thanks :-)
Rik

Re: Kevin's work

Posted: Fri Oct 13, 2017 2:41 pm
by St0rmykev
CADjewelrySchool wrote:Wow. Great design, cast and finish.
Has your casting house cast SolusCAST before?
Could you explain your curing process before sending off for casting?
Thanks :-)
Rik



This was the first project that we sent to them with this material. Techform is who we use for our platinum castings and they've have always done a very good job regardless of the material we throw at them to cast. Our curing process differs from a lot of the people on here with the Solus Cast. We used to run an EnvisionTEC printer that came with it's own curing unit. The printer kicked the bucket a long time ago but we still use the curing unit for all our resins. Its a pretty damn powerful unit and cures significantly faster than a lot of units currently on the market. For our resins, we set a timer for 2 minutes and rotate the model every 2 minutes until a total of 12 mins have past. We cast gold ourselves in house so we know this curing process works fine for The Emerald and Formlabs castable materials. Lately, a lot of my projects I've done have been in platinum so we have yet to cast this material in house. We do have a couple of projects lined up to be cast sometime in the middle of next week so I'll follow up with how they turned out. It could be possible that cure time might have to be re-evaluated for the SolusCast. Just depends on what kind of result we end up getting from these casts coming up.

Re: Kevin's work

Posted: Mon Oct 16, 2017 3:32 am
by JesseTaylor
Lovely original work Kevin...very nice!

Re: Kevin's work

Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 2:28 am
by CADjewelrySchool
We used to run an EnvisionTEC printer that came with it's own curing unit. The printer kicked the bucket a long time ago but we still use the curing unit for all our resins. Its a pretty damn powerful unit and cures significantly faster than a lot of units currently on the market. For our resins, we set a timer for 2 minutes and rotate the model every 2 minutes until a total of 12 mins have past.

Thanks Kevin. It sound like you are using the EnvisionTEC OttoFlash curing unit. That's a serious curing unit. They sell for $3k+ over here. Would be great to get some base line times for people using the B9 Curing unit. I think Email said min 2 hours. With a 10 min cycle time, that's alot of button presses. LOL

Re: Kevin's work

Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 3:09 am
by mongerdesigns
The unit we sell doesn’t have that limitation. You can run it for as many hours as you need. It has fans to cool the leds.

Re: Kevin's work

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 6:02 pm
by St0rmykev
Totally forgot to update ya on how our in house pieces came out after casting so I won't have any pictures for this post. All of them came out fine for the most part. The biggest issue we seem to be fighting with this material is the removal of ash. Before we cast, we pull a reverse vacuum on the flasks in an attempt to try to pull out any ash that could be still remaining in there and that has worked out pretty well for other resins we have cast. The SolusCast however, still has some ash left behind even after pulling a reverse vacuum. This has led to some surface issues on the castings we have done so far with this material. I plan on doing some experimenting with some longer cure times and see if maybe this help the ash issue. If we can eliminate that issue, our castings will be awesome!

Re: Kevin's work

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 6:12 pm
by mongerdesigns
Hi Kevin,

Have you tried holding for a little longer and slightly higher temp on the high end?

Re: Kevin's work

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 6:38 pm
by St0rmykev
mongerdesigns wrote:Hi Kevin,

Have you tried holding for a little longer and slightly higher temp on the high end?



Our currently setup for casting has us holding for 5 hours at 1560 F before casting. Not sure how much farther I could go up in temperature before having issues with our investment.

Re: Kevin's work

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 7:04 pm
by mongerdesigns
And you're positive that it's ash left behind and it's not investment breakdown of some sort?

Re: Kevin's work

Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 8:06 pm
by St0rmykev
[quote="mongerdesigns"]And you're positive that it's ash left behind and it's not investment breakdown of some sort?[/q

Our caster mentioned after pulling a reverse vacuum on one of the flasks that he could still look down into it and still see some ash that was still inside and couldn't be pulled away. If the investment had broken down, we would have had epic casting failures. That wasn't the case with this latest attempt. All the castings were totally usable and only needed repaired in certain areas where the leftover ash created some surface issues in some spots. We are doing another cast tomorrow with a ring that I significantly ramped up the amount of curing time that it received so we will see if that helps the end result.