BVOH Printing Issues
I am trying to print with BVOH supports with a PLA part. From everything I read, BVOH should be completely water soluable and dissolve completely in a warm water bath. However, my BVOH just turns into a gooey substance when submerged in warm water for 8hr+. This makes it very hard to remove from small crevices in my detailed PLA part.
How can I get my BVOH to dissolve completely?
Since I thought the BVOH may be contaminated with PLA, Ive tried printing just a BVOH cube with no PLA, and it still will not dissolve completely.
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks.
Best Answer by Diem:
It should get to a state where you can scrape most of it away then you rinse, change, soak, rinse ... until clear.
Better in many ways to use solubles as seperators rather than full supports.
Cheerio,
How can I get my BVOH to dissolve completely?
You do need rather a lot of water, are you changing it when it saturates?
Cheerio,
RE: BVOH Printing Issues
I am changing it when I think it saturates. It becomes slightly cloudy. I'm using about three cups of water for my 4x4x4mm cube of pure BVOH. Is this enough?
It should get to a state where you can scrape most of it away then you rinse, change, soak, rinse ... until clear.
Better in many ways to use solubles as seperators rather than full supports.
Cheerio,
RE: BVOH Printing Issues
I agree with @diem. You generally want soluble interfaces unless you're printing in tight areas where removing non-soluble part of the sorts would be difficult or risks breaking the model. When I print with solubles I soak the whole thing in warm water and then use a toothbrush to clean the model of any soluble residue. If you're doing this on the mmu, definitely make sure you're purging when switching from soluble to non-soluble so you don't get any of the soluble filament in your model. I generally use a value of 200(on the advanced purge configuration) when switching from soluble back to filament that becomes part of the model. this has given me good results.