It is extremely expensive, but it looks very interesting. It has no harmful vapors, cures via UV light. It might be the first finish we could approve for use in the shop.
I wonder if there is any difference between this stuff and 3D printing Resin?
~1/6th the price
I imagine there must be or Clean Armor would have several competitors in the market already.
The best way to figure something out is usually to look at the SDS and/or patents and make informed guesses as from there.
I’m not actually seeing a huge amount of difference here–it looks to be a fairly standard UV acrylate resin. (Cleanarmor Website: Patents). If I had to guess the main difference would be amount of photoinitiator used such that it cures more quickly than resin formulated for use on a 3D printer where its important that the resin doesn’t seize up. Resins formulated for different purposes may also be designed with different viscosities. I would guess its a bit runnier so it spreads more thinly on wood.
If I had to evaluate this, I think both patents are relatively weak. They are making claims for the coating as a “fire retardant” because the other stuff is probably already known and they couldn’t claim it. And then the second patent has basically been completely wiped out by the examiner with almost all the claims deleted.
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I looked at the SDS sheet for Clean Armor and it is incredibly vague
The Sunlu MSDS is better:
Here is the MSDS for Anycubic’s “High [speed] Clear Resin”
The lack of a CAS number on Clean Armor’s MSDS might be an issue:
But who know if there is a real enforcement mechanism.
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Their SDS is likely deficient. You can hide some components as a “trade secret” but they have taken it a bit too far in my opinion (you have to indicate its a trade secret and you can’t just say everything is a trade secret). I suspect they are hiding as much as they can because there isn’t anything particularly special.
However, even though there probably isn’t anything particularly novel from a chemistry or technology standpoint, that doesn’t mean it can’t be an effective product for the given application. A lot of things are formulated with known building blocks supplied by big chemical manufactures but getting something that works just right on a given surface can be a substantial amount of work.
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If I had to guess, I think the Anycubic High Speed Clear will perform more similarly to the Clear Armor finish than the Sunlu you linked. In any of these resins, the acrylate functional group is what allows it to cure by UV. The Sunlu is a urethane acrylate which should behave more like a polyurethane when cured (more likely to yellow over time). The Anycubic High Speed Clear appears to be an epoxy acrylate.
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