chakacha wrote:
The gel really does not cure too well, in my opinion. I would spread some lines on paper & keep the special flashlight on for up to a minute and it will still stay tacky. And it does have a strong chemical odor. Leaving the piece outside let the sun cure the gel better than the flashlight.
That's the trick with UV cure gels and resins -- they will set in the printer/under the UV light, but they don't fully cure in the '8 seconds' that the pens and other stuff say. There are a few options to get them fully cured. You can leave them out in the sun, like you mentioned, or put them in a window in a sunny side of the house (just beware that windows, especially newer high-efficiency windows will block a lot of UV). You can also build a cure-box using UV light bulbs or UV LEDs. You basically build a cure-box similar to a hot-box used for curing standard resins when laminating wood (these just use standard light bulbs to generate heat, like an Easy Bake oven) - just use UV lights instead of heat lights. If you're adventurous, you can get a UV laser (such as the diode from a Bluray player, or one of the "UV laser pointers" available for about $16 or so) and use that to cure the parts. If you go the laser route, just make sure you get some safety glasses that protect in the same range that your laser emits. You don't want to burn your eyes out.
Right now, I just use the sun to cure mine, but I'm building a cure-box - I'm making it a highly reflective interior (foil lined with foil tape on the seams) and multiple UV LEDs on each wall for uniform lighting.
