06 - Build Plate

Post date: Oct 6, 2015 11:52:13 AM

The two most challenging and time consuming aspects of this project were the resin vat and the build plate. The build plate needs to be flat, hold the cured resin substantially better than the bottom of the resin vat yet release the part at its base when finished printing. Similar to the vat designs, the fastest, simplest, cheapest approaches were attempted first. A plastic plate that could bolt onto the Z axis arm was printed on the FFF machine. Parts adhered so well with the MajerJuice G+ that removing them usually would result in breakage at the base. There were some successful prints. Glass was glued to the plate but then the parts would not stick well enough. Another challenge was getting the build plate aligned parallel to the bottom of the vat. It involved loosening, twisting and re-tightening the entire build plate assembly which would then shift again during tightening. It was at this point a detour was taken and I decided to build my own "portable" scaled down version of an SLA-DLP printer. During this process I worked out a consistently successful build plate design.

an early version of the build plate:

In action:

Here are examples of how the base of the part stuck too well to the PLA plates. Scuffing and drilling holes etc. made no real difference with a plastic plate.

Below is the final build plate (and vat) design (to date) developed on the SLA-mini then adapted to the larger printer. For more details about the process and the details of the design please see the blog entry for the SLA-mini.