Comment on RepRap Pioneer Returns With a DIY 3D Printer That Hits Micro-Level Precision

• beemikeoak@lemmynsfw.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Alcohol costs money and the vapors are toxic. You can get cirrhosis from inhaling that.

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  • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Isopropyl alcohol is significantly less toxic than the vapours from the resin itself, even if it’s water-washable. It’s somewhat more poisonous than regular alcohol, so it’s not a good idea to actively drink it, but it’s safe to inhale in reasonable quantities and get on your skin (as long as you’ve not mixed it with printer resin), hence being the main ingredient in hand sanitiser and pre-injection swaps.

    As for the cost, it’s inexpensive enough to balance with the cost saving from non-water-washable resin of comparable quality generally being a little cheaper. It’s not like you use a whole five-litre jug per print.

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    • beemikeoak@lemmynsfw.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Its just differently toxic. Acrylate monomer can give you the joy of cancer or physical toxicity.

      Here’s what happens when you drink isopropanol: www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMSgoppbXiU

      The thing about IPA is that if you smell it you’re getting a dose of it. That goes to your liver causing damage to it.

      Here’s some of what happens if you inhale MMA during a pedicure session: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVhjt8Pf6oI

      Yeah both things are bad news.

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      • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        You’re completely neglecting likely doses. If, instead of using it to clean a resin print, you drank the amount of isopropyl alcohol that you’d have used, then wait a day for your liver to clean things up, you’d be in about the same condition as if you’d drunk a whole bottle of wine and waited a day. Obviously, that’s not something that’s healthy to do regularly, but it’s not going to kill you if you do it once, and it’s something that some people choose to do several times a week then go on to live well beyond the average life expectancy.

        However, you don’t drink the isopropyl alcohol. You just inhale some of it. Unless you’re going out of your way to huff it, you won’t inhale a whole millilitre, and then most of what you inhale will be exhaled without being absorbed. If you do that once a week for a year, your liver will be in comparable condition to if at some point in that year, you had a beer once. As we all know, anyone who ever drinks a single beer immediately dies, so your life is over.

        While isopropyl alcohol is metabolised slightly differently to ethanol, going via acetone, the amount that gets into your body from incidental exposure as would happen with resin printing (especially if taking the kind of precautions necessary for the resin itself) would be metabolised into less acetone than is always in a healthy human body due to it being a byproduct of lots of things human cells normally do.

        Again, hand sanitiser and pre-injection swabs, both of which doctors rub on skin, have isopropyl alcohol as their main ingredient, enough for it to give hospitals their distinctive smell, so being able to smell isopropyl alcohol is not a sign that you’re getting a dose that you should worry about.

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