investigation of salt annealing of transparent pla parts chapter I

Hi everybody,

After having see the video from Stefan CNC Kitchen
Here below
https://www.cnckitchen.com/blog/testing-the-strength-of-3d-prints-re-melted-in-salt
Also he did a re sintering in plaster in an early attempt, another did a previous work with salt and a clear filament
https://hackaday.com/2020/09/23/reforming-3d-prints-with-salt-and-heat/

Both works are great.

I tried to get transparent pla 3d printed parts from a m3d printer and a poor quality pla filament.
But nevertheless for the trial a good way to go.

I exchanged some mails with stefan from cnc kitchen which push me to keep on.
Thanks a lot to both of them for pioneering and showing me the way.

So first I tried to print a calibration dice with a high infill as 100 pct was not possible... I found a way afterwards: setting skin number sothat it cannot print any infill. So i put 20 skin counts... just in case if somebody is struggling with this too.

Once printed, I used salt and a kitchen shredder to get finer salt particles, used a sieve to select only the smallest particles portion. Then I use a glass container, filled a bit with salt about 1 cm pressed with a part just little smaller than the container, then layed down the dice and filled from the middle in order to recover the dice with 1 cm of salt. Then pressed the salt again with the dice inside.

I put this at 200C. For 2 hours then take out the oven let it cool for 15 min then take the salt away...
And I got the frosty wall effect as mentioned already.
And look at the dice ... they did not maintain shape (here it was really bad but later much better)

From there I thought ok what can be done to get transparency? Salt particles are kind of stamped on the surface leaving this look...
But is it really only a mold effect or does it react with the pla?
I have not the answer yet.

I worked on some solutions watch chapter II which comes at some point.

NOTA first scorchcad android I made as dummy stl for the fun ... as nothing can be published without a stl...