I ran out of grey, my go to color and had to use the black I have.
Back when I bought a supply of resin cartridges I bought three black, four grey and one clear.
The grey and clear are good, no real issues with the resin.
The black on the other hand is pure garbage. Most every time I use it, the print fails. The supports are always so weak, sickly almost. I can break them off with a stern look. They bend and flex as if they didn’t cure.
The same file, same supports and print settings in grey or clear does not have this issue. I printed a file as per a suggestion from Dank but as you can see, that print failed miserably wasting about 8 hours of time. Thanks Dank.
The same file at .25 at least printed but had globs of semi cured resin on it and the printed objects “skin” was peeling off. Post curing saved some if it.
For those of you that use black, are you doing something in the settings to get better results?
I have had good results about a year ago with earlier versions, but since then I had a slew of different types of failures (rashing, weak supports, flaky prints, much like yours sometimes and other times much better but still miles from what it should be in terms of surface quality). We tried a bunch of stuff and always thoroughly yet gently stirred the resin before printing to avoid the heavy sedimentation with this resin, but it didn’t help.
I would love to contact Formlabs support and help solve this but I have no time for this : we bought this printer to have very quick design loops, be able to temporarily extinguish fire in the production line and help with other pressing issues, not to tinker with is. I can get by by printing in Grey which is much more reliable and paint afterwards if I need the part to be black.
All other resin print fine or at least much better, we treat our printer very well with only a couple of trained people using it. Optical path is clear, tanks are clean or switched when in doubt. We have a >90% print success and most of the other 10% are due to me tending to easily hit the “failure” button when anything is out of the ordinary
This is somewhat of a tangent but generally it’s advisable to avoid keeping your parts large surfaces parallel to the build plate. Resin issues aside supports and prints are much more likely to fail, in my experience, due to this than any other reason.
Notice on the above example when the printer transitions from “supports” (red) to the first part layer. At that point it goes from a work area of ~Y mm^2 to like ~100 Y mm^2 in one resolution step. This leaves you with two major issues: a dangerously thin layer with very little support, but also a proportionally high removal force to get the layer off the PDMS, compared to an angled sample of the same size:
Angling the part solves both issues: the transition from support structure to part structure is more gradual, both reducing the force needed to pull it off and greatly reduce the amount of unsupported material, as more of the part is able to be built upon itself.
Nothing half as bad as that! Just one incorrectly chipped tank and the occasional uncured surface area (i assumed it was due to running in open mode). I would definitely contact customer support.
Hello there! We’re so sorry to see you’re having some issues with your black resin prints! I would echo other folks above and say definitely get in touch with our support team via the link below and we would be happy to get to the bottom of this issue with you.
This looks to me like there might be some optical issues going on. This could either be caused by an underpowered laser diode, or via contamination on the optical surfaces themselves. The fact that Black resin is showing these problems first is fairly typical. Our Black resin requires the most energy input in order to print, so we would expect to see these sorts of issues manifest with that material before you see it in other resin types.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us and we’ll get to the bottom of this issue so we can get you back to printing ASAP!
I will reach out, thanks Danke. My printer was replaced yesterday and I will print with the new machine.
The printers optical bed (glass) is spotless and the tank was new with this failed print. The resin was also new.
The same file is now 98% done @ .025 and appears to be ok save the unwanted resin globs which is semi cured gelatinous resin that looks coagulated.
The print itself did not fail but the supports ended up being printed so they are fused along the entire length of the support to the object body which intersects detail area making the removal of it impossible.
Glad to hear you’ve reached out! We’ll be in contact shortly.