I took the plunge and bought a resin printer. I was wondering if I could use full strength home-brew vodka at 90 % instead of using isopropyl alcohol before anything is added to clean prints with?
I cannot seem to find anywhere or anyone that has tried this.
Isopropyl-Alcohol - Propan-2-ol - and Ethyl alcohol - Ethan-1-ol - are different chemically. As a secondary alcohol, Propan-2-ol has quite different solubility of different materials than ethyl-alcohol.
Now, let's look at home made alcoholic destillate. That stuff is, if done in one refraction and without tossing the first low temperature part, some percentages Metanol, Ethyl alcohol and maybe some water. That has not the same solvent properties as Propan-2-ol.
While it might work, nobody will sign a guarantee that it doesn't negatively impact your print.
Some manufacturers do recommend ethanol and not isopropanol. The problem would be getting relatively pure ethanol through distillation. When distilling you will get different fractions which may be full of methanol or water. You will probably need to do multiple runs. You could just buy some 95% ethanol and distill it once it gets dirty or leave it in the sun to cure the resin and filter it out.
Answer taken from Apesa's highly upvoted, and now deleted, comments (1 and 2). If Apesa posts their own answer, then this wiki answer can be deleted.
Note: Please don't post answers in comments - that is not how SE works.
Isopropyl Alcohol is the more common choice for cleaning surfaces because it evaporates more rapidly than ethanol and also because it does not leave any traces of oils upon evaporation.
To add one more caveat. Homemade alcohol no matter the proof / % will have many fusile alcohols that will deposit themselves on your semi cured resin. 90% alcohol dosen't equate to clean solvent.
