Hi Scott,
I picked up a Zcorp not too long ago too. And to my disappointment refilling the powder and binder costs more than I paid for the machine itself! The monopoly/corporate greed with this technology is outrageous. I understand it took a lot of development dollars but a 60 something fold markup on materials is extortion in my opinion! I would be happy to pay anything less than double of the base ingredients cost for something blended that I know that works. I would think the original purchase price of the printer alone would create a sufficient profit margin.
I tried the sake and hydroperm as well. I started with a new printhead and it worked for a short while, I think only because there was ink in the new printhead. Once that ran through I got the same results as you -the printhead kept going to the cleaning station, striping in the print, and overheating errors. I think maybe the sake recipe works ok for different print heads in the other printers but not the HP10 printhead?
After feeling like a failure I mixed some distilled water, isopropyl alcohol (90%) and inkjet cleaner solution (from ebay). I poured it in by eye about 60 parts water 20 parts cleaner and 20 parts alcohol and it seemed to work ok (in hindsight I should have measured the amounts). I have no idea if the cleaner is designed to run through these printheads. I only have a few prints on it but it has yet to break anything… I since have had success printing with hydroperm. The downside is it takes a long long time to dry to get strong enough to handle. To solve this I made a custom build plate that can go into an oven -sturdy aluminum plate with sandpaper glued on the top. After printing I raised the build platform all the way to the top cleaning up powder on the sides of the part so it does not fall of when transporting to the oven but being careful not to disturb the part. I then bake in a toaster oven I bought in the name of science just for this. One hour at 300 F did the trick for the three parts I have tried. Going to do some aluminum pours in the hydroperm molds hopefully this week.
I have yet to find a supplier for hydroperm locally. While I was waiting for it to be shopped I tried some homebrew concoctions (tring to copy hydroperm from the msds) consisting of: plaster (Sheetrock Easy Sand Joint Compound), portland cement, and foot powder. I tried mixing in #80 sand as well. I cant say any of the tests worked any better than hydroperm.
As for the ink solution make sure and check out this link Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos
I can’t figure out where to get SURFYNOL (R) 465. Airproducts won’t ship to a non-industrial zoned shipping address.
The reason I bought the printer is to print molds for direct pour casting Aluminum. Apparently ZCorp used to sell ZCast that was formulated for this but they no longer sell a substitute as far as I can tell. I called 3D Systems and they had no idea what I was talking about - they only could recommend products for lost wax casting (I’m not interested in that). I sent them an email and they have yet to respond… I should have done more research before I bought the printer I guess. I assumed they still sold it and since it is made out of sand it would be cheap.