Viktor,
Nice! Where did you happen upon that equpment? I'd be interested to see pictures of the scan head and any accompanying lenses... It's been a while since I've worked around a "professional" SLA machine, and at the time I didn't think to take pictures of the optics.
If you do get one of those systems working and reading g-code, you're 95% of the way there. 405 nm diodes are relatively cheap - I picked up one with some basic optics, 400 mW, and the diode driver, for $99 - shipped from the US so there weren't any customs issues. They gut them from blu-ray burners, and you can just get the laser sled with the diodes for around $40. It's fairly easy to machine an optics mount/alignment setup for a diode laser, or if you want to buy them, Thorlabs has parts for (relatively) cheap.
All you would need after that is a bed platform system. Stepper motor, some threaded rod or leadscrew, and a piece of borosilicate (pyrex) glass (standard soda-lime glass has crappy transmission in the UV spectrum) to use as a print bed. This link is a stick-on teflon coating so the cured resin sticks to the print bed, and not the glass.
My lasers have recently arrived, so I'm going to start building here in the next couple weeks hopefully, once I re-up my machine shop access at work. I tested the lasers with the bucktown polymers resin (I picked up some a few months ago when they still sold it in quarts) and it works great - not quite as fast as the video I posted earlier, but I was just kinda waving the laser at the resin while holding the laser with my hand, so focus was not ideal. Cure depth of around 0.1mm, and cured areas after about 2 seconds of wiggling the laser around.
Nice! Where did you happen upon that equpment? I'd be interested to see pictures of the scan head and any accompanying lenses... It's been a while since I've worked around a "professional" SLA machine, and at the time I didn't think to take pictures of the optics.
If you do get one of those systems working and reading g-code, you're 95% of the way there. 405 nm diodes are relatively cheap - I picked up one with some basic optics, 400 mW, and the diode driver, for $99 - shipped from the US so there weren't any customs issues. They gut them from blu-ray burners, and you can just get the laser sled with the diodes for around $40. It's fairly easy to machine an optics mount/alignment setup for a diode laser, or if you want to buy them, Thorlabs has parts for (relatively) cheap.
All you would need after that is a bed platform system. Stepper motor, some threaded rod or leadscrew, and a piece of borosilicate (pyrex) glass (standard soda-lime glass has crappy transmission in the UV spectrum) to use as a print bed. This link is a stick-on teflon coating so the cured resin sticks to the print bed, and not the glass.
My lasers have recently arrived, so I'm going to start building here in the next couple weeks hopefully, once I re-up my machine shop access at work. I tested the lasers with the bucktown polymers resin (I picked up some a few months ago when they still sold it in quarts) and it works great - not quite as fast as the video I posted earlier, but I was just kinda waving the laser at the resin while holding the laser with my hand, so focus was not ideal. Cure depth of around 0.1mm, and cured areas after about 2 seconds of wiggling the laser around.