Hello,
I’ve had 2 failed prints in a row. I had just cleaned my resin tank and I noticed immediate degradation in the surface quality. I combed the resin tank, and then poured the content through a strainer, mixed the filtered resin and returned it to the resin tank. The attached photos show the printing performance immediately after. have a look at the photos and give me some advice on how to fix the problem. thanks
Hi Courtlandt, it’s tough to troubleshoot with just the photos of the end product. Do you have form files that you could share?
I didn’t save the form file. I was printing 4 of these .obj Wedges i made w rhino, and another file which is too large to upload on the forum.
Hmm, if you haven’t already opened up a request with our support team, you certainly should do so. They’ll walk you through a number of different options to take a good look at your machine.
Are you able to export the wedges individually? If you can do that, you can orient and support them in PreForm. The current setup is not ideal.
First Problem is you are printing hollow objects directly to the platform. Formlabs unfortunately refuses to support printing directly to the platform, so they will likely just tell you to print with supports. So here is some advice on printing directly to the platform. Print solid when you can. If you can’t you need to print the object with a hole in it opening up the hollow area as soon as the hollow area starts. The problem is that during the peel process there is too much pressure fluctuation in the cavity formed by the hollow area which blows the walls out. You can see this in the base of your prints as soon as the hollow area starts you have a hole in the wall of the part. If you print the part with a hole already there you will give the part a path to equalize the pressure and it won’t blow a hole in the wall. The size of the hole is tricky to get right and varies depending on the size of the cavity but just having one will make a huge difference.
So the next thing to go wrong was that resin from the blown out walls was now floating around while the print continued. This will wreak havoc on the rest of the print. I can’t comment on the part in the middle except to say it looks like it failed early on which made that big flap. This failure could have been due to the walls of the other parts blowing out and stray resin pieces interfering or just poor supports. Then it looks like a good part of the print merged with the big flap pulling it up off the tank with the rest of the print, but that’s just a guess.
So also a side note on printing to the bed, since Formlabs does not make the build platform and the resin tank parallel anything you print to the platform will come out with a lean when placed on the side that was attached to the platform. Along with some other less noticeable problems.
Thanks for the advice Rocus. I appreciate the information. I’ve opened a support ticket. hopefully I’ll get this problem sorted out quickly. I keep getting emails from people wanting me to print parts for them, and I can’t until I get the machine running.
Ive just added some info and pics to this thread that may be of interest: https://support.formlabs.com/entries/77997417-Failed-prints-and-minimal-support?page=1#post_25888676