First – Hats off to Vince Erb for bringing my attention to this. Without his excellent write-up, I probably wouldn’t have figured this out for a long long time!
On the resin tank, there is a clear “sticker” on the bottom of the tray. It is quite important that you remove the sticker before printing! From my experience, it really affects the quality.
I’m posting this as a separate thread because I see people every day with some issues with printing objects and I can’t help but wonder if this simple little piece is causing a lot of issues. That being said, my printer has only ever had 1 failed print and I’ve gone through my first liter of resin.
Before, the layers of the printer were not lining up very well. There was a “jog” every few layers.
Now, all the layers are nearly perfectly aligned (you have to zoom to 100x at least to see some misalignment of the layers). The quality of the printed parts are sooooo much better (in my experience so far).
Attached are some high mag pictures. The most important is the before / after picture. The rest just show high magnification (again, like my last post) but I think it is interesting because previously these details were not visible in the print. Only after removing the sticker was I able to see this detail.
Thanks David and thanks for making a separate thread about this! I’ve been wondering if some people weren’t having issues for the same reason also. It sounds like Formlabs is definitely going to make sure that future purchasers are made aware of the sticker but it needed to be pointed out to current owners just incase they missed it the same as we did! Resin and time aren’t cheap & it’s frustrating to loose so much of both because of a #@$#* sticker! Vince
Thanks, David, for these high res images and thanks to Vince Erb for the first PSA thread. New tanks being shipped now are packaged so that all the protective stickers will be removed as a single sheet.
If you are printing now and don’t remember removing a protective sticker from the underside of your tank, you should check for that. Just remember to remove the build platform before removing the resin tank and take care to avoid spilling resin, if the tank is already full.
The photos are very nice and I was actually surprised that the sticker wasn’t having a more obvious negative impact on print quality. Sorry for any frustration these stickers caused and thanks for bringing this to our attention.
This was DEFINITELY a problem for me as well. Since removing that film (which is not mentioned in ANY of the documentation I could find!!!) I have not had a single failed print. It was clearly the root of most of my print issues.
Thanks for having a post about this. I did notice an “odd” coloration at the bottom of the Vat, but had not dived in to explore. After reading the post regarding the film while I was out of town on a business trip, I knew what was going on!
Is this sticker on the surface of the tray that is facing upwards or facing downwards?
@Christian,
See Formlabs’ video here: http://vimeo.com/72289803
Especially around 0:44 into the video
It’s on the dry/bottom side.
Thank you so much for bringing this to our attention! I did not remove this sticker and have been experiencing minor issues with my prints. Much appreciated!!
Does the new orange resin tanks for Form1+ the same sticker at the bottom of the tank? Because I don’t see anything in there. Some of you can confirm that?
No it does not this solution was resolved when the Form 1+ was released… Some people are reviving really really old posts (Jan 2014) was when this one was started. The new resin tanks (orange) only have a clear wrap around them if you try to pry anything off the bottom of the tray you may need to either replace it or re-polish the acrylic if there are smudges present.