So what happens to the coating if you don't hit it with strong uv right away, what if you pull it back. Instant is something needed for the printers, those things are flying. Now for the finishing we need, absolute instant speed is not necessary.
What happens to the stuff if you pack it out into full sunlight?
Ok first the sunlight, yes sunlight will cure it, after a few days of exposure. This stuff is allways kept in black plastic containers or metal to keep the light from slowly affecting the coating.
Now UV coatings cure, they don't dry, when it is hit by the UV lamp (and it must be high intensity, that's why sunlight takes so long) to put it simply, the molecules start moving and hit each other and crosslink to form a solid.
By the way UV coatings are considered 100% solids (no voc's). There is no way to control time of cure, it's either instantaneous or not (unless you have continous exposure like the sun, then it could take days or weeks and you may never even get a full cure. We used to put buckets of old coating outside to cure under the sun so we could throw it in the trash, but it never worked.
Maybe this was bad to bring up, trying to take a printing process to pen making. If you could get someone to make a thicker UV coating and then find a way to get your turned blanks to rotate maybe at 50 rpm and apply the UV coating, then apply some heat to smooth out the surface, and then hit it with the lamp, it would work.
I wasn't a chemist in the ink business, I was technical service, I went to pressrooms and solved problems that were ink related.
As far as presses flying, a lathe flies much faster. Presses at high speeds run at most 500 fpm and at that your lucky if you can cure coatings or dry inks. You usually run around 150 to 300 fpm. If you do it long enough you can actually stop the image with your eyes. These are Flexographic web presses, not the one sheet at a time offset presses.
If anyone knows someone at one of the large pen making supply companies, they may have the time and money to research this. If you would like to know more, you should be able to Google UV coatings. Most printing ink comapies sell coatings in one gallon to totes at somewhere between 5 and 10 dollars per pound. So expense of the coating itself wouldn't be that much. 90 dollars per gallon at most. Think of how much you pay for a pint what you use now.
If you would like to know some of the larger companies that deal with this stuff in one gallon quantities, try Flint Group Narrow Web, Environmental ink (they have been sold but you should still be able to find them through Google). There are a lot of smaller companies that deal with them too.
