Black Resin V4 consistently poor prints and failures

We typically use grey resin, however, we tried black. Previously, we have had only “orange peel” and tolerance issues using black. However, today we had an extremely large failure. This experience has been very frustrating, I am not sure what may be causing these issues. At this point, I feel staying away from black is my best option.

The last few days we have had similar issues with failed tough prints.

My friend you are LUCKY to not have had a spill, given he state of your tank.

I have also had bad experiences with Black which I mostly linked to the fact that it is hard to keep it homogeneous.

If you also have had issues with Tough though, which is quite a tolerant resin, you might wanna contact support. Maybe you got a spec of dust somewhere on the path of the laser.

Printing this will probably help you put down a first diagnosis.

I have to agree with JohnHue…

I’ve had black fail like the MN Vikings in a playoff (I’m a fan, BTW)… and I agree it must be because of the pigment mixing. You get the same thing from Flexible too.

It’s amazing that you didn’t have a spill/overflow, because of the scale/type-of failure and it’s interaction with the wiper arm.

But he’s also correct in his statement that if you had a similar failure with tough… that’s suprising. Tough doesn’t fail like this. If it does… it’s more of a "morph or deformation of the geometry… not the “soup” black gives you.

If our theory is correct… and it is the pigment, then you need to manually mix the tank. It’s a practice I have embraced. I actually stir and scrape the bottom of the black tank with the putty knife. You will notice a thin layer on the silicone, if the resin hase been sitting for a while… so stie and scrape the tank, and shake the hell out of the cartridge!

I’ve had a number of failures with black V4 and the root of the problem seems to be supports breaking off near the base. See this thread for some photos and discussion:

I have never heard of Johnhue’s suggestion about shaking the cartridge, I’ll have to give that a try.

With nearly 3 kgs of Black v4 in stock, I’ve been advised by Support not to use it until there is a solution to this. Grey, Rigid all building perfectly well, so either my laser power is marginally down, and super sensitive Black v4 can’t cope, or there is something up with the resin…

Either way, I’ve binned at least a kilo of resin, ditched a tank and delayed launching a bunch of products over this. Not terribly happy about it to be honest, although Support have been magnificent as usual.

That was @SchemeInc’s suggestion but I completely agree. Shaking pigment-heavy resins like Black and White is a must, and the danger is that you never know if you have shaken it enough… and seeing how much of an issue sedimentation is for Black and how much effort it is to get the tank back to an homogeneous state, I can’t imagine how the resin in the cartridge could be homogeneous.

In the same vein, stirring the tank and using the scraper to remove those sedimented pigments from the bottom is also necessary.

I have had the same issues with the V4 black Resin. Multiple failures with supports breaking or just not printing.

Hi everyone,

Sorry to jump into the conversation, but I recently had exactly the same problem. I print also with black resin and I was until end of August (so few days ago) very satisfied with it. But the last 3 prints failed badly, in a very similar ways as your description and photos. Very often, it appears the object does not stick to the build platform and/or the support breaks from its base. Unfortunately, I cannot share picture because of confidentiality issues.

My question though, is why was I able to print a lot of objects without problems and suddenly get messy prints with massive failure?
I have a hard time to identify the problem since I changed the tray, updated the software and firmware at more or less the same time which makes it hard to identify which one could responsible.
Or, is the black resin V4 the main problem and I have simply been very lucky until recently to print successfully and getting now back to the normal quality “standards” of this resine?

Other question: according to your experience, which resin is the most “reliable”?
Our prints are meant to be painted, so the color does not really matter. We paint in 0.025 mm resolution.

And last question: Do you change the build platform sometimes? Our platform is the original one. I never read it should be renewed regularly, but ours start to look like it did not age well with few scratches. Could it be also another reason why the print does not always stick to it?

Thank you very much in advance for your suggestions!

If you are satisfied with the mechanical properties of the Black resin, then Grey is much more reliable and also prints much faster. Clear would work also but may be a bit more difficult to paint if you need an opaque part, but it is the fastest resin to print with I think. I would not recommend White as it also has homogeneity issues which may lead to unreliability.

I have very lightly sanded my build platform a dozen of times over the course of the last year and a half, just to make it a bit more homogeneous. If I start getting adhesion issues (I have not), I can always lower the Z offset to compensate… Unlikely as it sounds, I had to increase the Z offset by 0.4mm recently after some recent updates because parts were too hard to remove from the BP.

Thank you very much for your quick answer.

We use to print with clear resin. We had also gray. Interesting enough, we choose to stick with black resin because it seemed to have a much better success/failure ratio than the other ones.

I have to confess I had no idea that the grey and clear resin would print much faster. which is a big advantage for us (on top of failing less often).
We do not give too much importance to mechanical properties because we print parts for scaled car models (so lamps, mirrors, wheels, etc…). We only need the highest surface quality as possible to make it easy to sand and paint later on. They basically have no other functions than to be “place holders”.
I asked my colleagues, clear resin is not a problem for painting opacity.

I just stopped a print after 1 hour because I found out that there was a new firmware update and noticed that among the 5 pieces that were being printed, one was simply not there, meaning that the base of its support was somewhere on the tray and not stuck to the BP. It happens to be a small part. So far, there were no problem with the 4 other parts/objects. As far as I recall, only small parts seem to fail.

Thanks again for sharing your experience

The more pigment / the more opaque the resin the slower it is to print because the laser exposure time is longer. You can easily check the influence of this in Preform by just changing the material, sometimes it can be significant although it depends on the size of your parts.

Now what i’m about to say can be subjective but I feel like Grey renders small details better than Clear, edges are crispier. Maybe that’s just due to the color, maybe that’s due to the relative opacity of the resin which makes unwanted curing / light contamination during printing have less effect.

Back is definitely only needed if you need a black / opaque part out of the printer. But the fact that you have to fight the pigment settling so much to get a good print makes it a no-go for me, i much prefer to paint Grey with mate black.

I have the thick end of 3 kilos of Black sitting on my shelf that I can’t/won’t/have been advised not to print with…

Ho hum.

Tim

This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.