DIY stereolithography 3D Printer

in how-to by DP | 10 comments

Andy built a 3D stereolithography printer, and provided instructions on how to build your own.

Resin is cured in layers using a UV laser. A linear actuator moves the stage down slightly after each layer is hardend, slowly building the 3D object in layers. Check out a time-laps video below the fold.

Via the contact form.

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  1. Jan says:

    this video shows is better, in real time, but you see more details how it works

  2. arhi says:

    There is actually another, way faster way to do this. Instead of UV laser you use a lcd projector (dlp would be even better) so you can display a whole layer at once.

  3. JBeale says:

    My understanding was you needed the UV laser to get the right wavelength (like 385 nm) and optical power density to cause the resin to catalyze into a plastic. Do they make UV projectors that are as bright as a laser spot, but everywhere in the focal plane at once? Seems like that would take a lot of power.

  4. JBeale says: looks really amazing, excellent resolution- I can hardly believe it is a DIY project. I did not see many details on that site about how it actually works, though.

    • arhi says:

      It uses DLP projector, not sure about else. In general with DLP you can easily switch the original lamp to a UV lamp and go with any UV curing resin .. the whole point with DLP is that it uses MEMS chip with bunch of mirrors compared to TFT projector that uses crystals to block the light. With DLP you can use any wavelength lamp and it works ..

  5. JBeale says:

    FWIW, it seems both your projects rely on UV light. The page says they use a white-light video projector, but they note it works because the projector output still has some UV, and that UV is what enables the polymerization. (It is probably slow, due to low UV levels.)

  6. Bez says:

    what about the UV laser source power? should it be 1 m Wat or more ?

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