Secondary Machining of Vat-Photopolymerised Parts

Printed photopolymer parts are routinely reamed, faced, drilled or threaded when printing alone cannot deliver the required feature. A directly relevant bibliographic record has now been identified: Kim, Kim and Kim report a study of curing and machining conditions in post-processing of an SLA-manufactured polymer [26]. Its bibliographic identity is verified, but neither its abstract nor its full text is present in the preserved evidence for this review. It therefore establishes that a directly relevant record exists, while supporting no transferable cutting parameter, cure sequence, numerical outcome, outcome class or universal process window here. The central result is narrower: the evidence recovered is too sparse and incompletely accessible to define a validated, transferable VPP-specific machining envelope. An exact full-text search of the 2023 photopolymer additive-manufacturing workshop report found no occurrence of machining, machined, milling, drilling or turning [6]; this remains a result about that document, not the field as a whole. The available printed-polymer parameters come from declared thermoplastic contrasts whose governing mechanisms cannot be assumed for a crosslinked network. ISO 2818 addresses machining plastics without naming additively manufactured stock, and the ASTM F42 subcommittee structure does not establish a dedicated secondary-machining qualification route. This review consequently provides no general machining practice. It defines the workpiece state, preserves the boundary between operation and feature performance, and specifies a local qualification architecture for the exact print-cure-machining configuration.