I’ve already submitted a ticket for this issue but I thought it might be helpful to other users to also post it here.
My prints were going well and I was getting a reasonable success rate (though better with clear than castable). Then for no reason that I know of, everything started failing. Even files that I had successfully printed before. Here is what I did and still had the same problems.
I updated preform and the firmware
I cleaned both my clear resin tank and my castable resin tank. Neither were damaged or cloudy in any way. The castable resin tank did have a few fingerprints which I cleaned off.
The main mirror had no smudges, just a few specs of dust which I blew off with compressed air.
I ran both resins trough paint filters and added fresh resin to the tanks
Neither resin is expired.
I printed the test file and all but 1 failed and the one that didn’t was not as consistent as previous prints I have done. I can’t imagine what changed. The printer is never moved. Unless something just died. I have not previously had any problems prints not sticking to the build platform but that is clearly an issue now.
When you used compressed air, is this shop air or canned?
My guess is that support will have you clean all 4 mirrors. The picture they will send (just guessing) will show how smudges and surface junk is hard to see in some light but really easy to see in others.
Besides looking for dust, I have found it really easy to miss this strange purple haze, streaks. I am gathering mine was from IPA in an attempt to clean off settled deposits. I will try to take a picture of an old mirror I have to show what I am trying to describe.
I would also do a laser spot test. I have found that this helps show me how dirty / clean the mirrors are as well as showing me what the laser spot actually looks like. No need to mess with paper. The shape on the cover will be enough to show the spot and the rings around it. I will look for those files I have to show how much it changes depending on how clean my mirrors were.
That should be a good place to start. I would hold off on taking the printer apart until FL tells you it is ok to. This way your warranty stays intact incase a mirror breaks or something else happens.
Yeah, most likely it’s dirty mirrors. The large mirror gets pretty dusty just over time even if you’re careful, you can see it best if you take your phone light and shine it towards you from the bottom most likely you’ll see a lot of dust.
It’s best not to use air to clean the dust at all, because it can blow dust onto the other mirrors like the galvo mirrors which are a much bigger pain to clean and it doesn’t take much dust to have an effect on those.
I did hear back from support. They confirmed that my resins are not expired. They told me to clean all 4 mirrors. Which I have done. The smaller mirror near the galvo mirrors was dusty. I’m hoping that was the culprit. I also thoroughly cleaned the main mirror. Originally there were no streaks or smudges but it took forever to get rid of the streaks from cleaning it! lol. I would take a picture but unless you see streaks in the picture, it is easy to assume I don’ t have the light at the right angle. Now everything is clean and I’m trying another test print. Fingers crossed.
The test print failed almost exactly the same as the first test print. I’ve sent pictures to support and am awaiting a response. I can’t imagine what changed. One day it worked and I was getting about 80% success then the next 0%.
