Has anyone thought about making their own polyjet printer? they print at about 16 microns and I think you should be able to mod a normal paper printer to print with resin and then add some strong UV LEDs to print heads.
something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_WvOVaOoyU
but what if you used UV cured resin and made it have a z axis? you could have full color high res prints. could you not?
IDEAS
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hook up a arduino on the paper feeder pins and instead of a new sheet you could make it move the z
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no new firmware, you just tell it to print a few hundred “pages” at a time with each page being a new layer.
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a very specific color is = to a different material, it would be much easier to print rigid along with flexible.
There are two kinds of inkjet print heads: thermal and piezo. The cheap thermal ones are used in consumer paper printers, but the piezo ones are needed for depositing resin. You could, however, probably mod an inkjet printer in this way to print a binder onto powder.
It’s interesting. I suspect to make it work for 3D printing is more than just a mechanical hack. I think you’d need to hack the firmware to handle the Z motion control. You’d need a custom or modified program to generate the ‘pages’. At some point, it might be easier to design a new system, and maybe just repurpose print heads, assuming inkjet print heads can handle the viscous UV sensitive materials in question.
thought of the idea two years ago in connection with a power printer. you need to start with a printer that isn’t going to stop printing when it’s cartridge chips say they should have run out of ink.
But the bigger question is durability: how many prints is that cheap inkjet printer designed to do before it expires (plastic gears wear out, dc motor brushes fail). One 3D print is equivalent is a lot of sheets of paper.