Tethon ceramic powder

[dragonator]

There has been quite a powder printing silence for the last few months. I have been busy, but not everything worked, and not everything was sharable.

On of the things that I now can share, is that I am working with 3D printed ceramics from Tethon. I got samples of stoneware, terra cotta, and porcelain, and their binder. I have not yet printed great amounts with it, but I do intend to do so.

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Printing experience of this material in my inexperienced view. Great. It does pack a little, holding the part firm in the powder. It deposits new layers without disturbing previous layers. I have printed a test cylinder to test the dried properties. It is drying in the oven as I type. I have no idea what the white specks are, they do seem to be in the powder.

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For cleaning more complex parts with powders that are actually fairly bad for you, I do have a proper negative pressure depowder chamber. Again, this is untested, but I hope it works fine. I is a foldable chamber (small gaps are hopefully no issue since the chamber is negative pressure) with a cyclonic separator on the back. I could have bought mine, but I wanted to try printing one. This version has 8 parallel cyclones. I do plan on adding an extra stage with even smaller cyclones on the back, but first I will see how this performs. If the front arm gaps leak too much powder I will add brushes. When the chamber works and there is interest I can share the plans for the woodwork and the cyclone.

All powder handling is done with respiratory equipment, since silicosis does not seem very desirable.

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For the first few prints I will get a feel for the green and dry strengths, and how to handle this powder. I will then make prints that I will actually fire. I have a pottery workshop fairly close with a kiln that I can use.

More information will be shared when I have more progress.

[maxt]

Hi dragonator, which of the Tethon powders you are testing is the whitest one ?

and one more question, you said that the powder packs a little bit... do you know if it would clog the aspiration conducts of the zcorp printers ? Not sure if the printer you revitalized has a vacuum aspirator to test with...

The main problem with alternative powders for 3DS/Zcorp printers is not the print quality or the smoothness of the bed. It's that when you vacuum the print bed, it simply clogs the whole stuff and it takes hours to unclog

[dragonator]

Hello,

Earthenware and porcelain are both roughly the same whiteness (unfired). I have yet to fire any parts.

None of my printers have integrated vacuums. Is that the aspiration conducts you are referring to? The feeding of the Tethon powder is fairly nice, though the surface does tend to be a bit rough. I still need to optimize the feed speeds to get that better.

[dragonator]

I have printed some more with Tethon. The ideal inkjet saturation seems to be 210%, or 1260DPI in the weeping direction (and 600 in the other) at a layer thickness of 0,1mm. I have printed a Moai, and a scaled espresso cup. Scaled so far, because I am not made of time. Once I know I can fire I will print full scale.

Printing is fairly nice, but I have run into an interesting issue. There is a weak spot every 12,7mm, or every sweep. The cup I printed separated on 2 very clean lines, the exact lines I was printing at. I have 2 options to fix this. The first is to force the motion so that it will be guaranteed to overlap. Make 12,7mm 12,65mm so I am absolutely certain that the layers of binder overlap. The other is to print the half overlapping inkjet pattern most printers make by default (viewtopic.php?p=6449#p6449).

I do first have a little vacation coming up, so I will not have time to implement this, but after I get back I will finally start with some software again. Hopefully I will also get to firing parts then.

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[maxt]

Hello,

Earthenware and porcelain are both roughly the same whiteness (unfired). I have yet to fire any parts.

None of my printers have integrated vacuums. Is that the aspiration conducts you are referring to? The feeding of the Tethon powder is fairly nice, though the surface does tend to be a bit rough. I still need to optimize the feed speeds to get that better.

Thanks.

yes, I mean the aspiration conducts. They clog very easily on the 3Ds Projets