This is a question for you who specifically print with Nylon 12GF.
A few months ago i suddenly noticed that the surfacearmor and powder in general was much harder to remove. If this was on a particular printer then it would be something with that particular printer such as airheater, quartztubes, RTD etc.
But this is our entire fleet.
My first and most obvious guess was our tumble blasting cabinet. (Normfinish 3D Solid Clean)
I figuered something was going wrong with it. But, i have spent approx 6 months trouble shooting, changing settings, pressure, gun, hoses, dialing in everything but nope, still the same bad result from blasting. I´ve even had techsupport from Normfinish service rep here and still no improvement. They cannot find anything wrong with it.
What was once a functioning work flow now involves handblasting almost all parts to remove powder from certain areas of parts as it won´t reach those areas when tumble blasting. This is insanely time consuming as we have 5 sls printers and 1 blaster.
I started thinking that this is not a blaster/printer issue. Could it be a material issue?
Have any of you lot printing with Nylon 12GF noticed anything different? Any difference suddenly appear after a firmware update?
Im seriously getting more gray hair than i already have from this.
What baffles me is that it the same result on all printers, all parts we are blasting. Even parts we have blasted for 4 years suddenly look like crap once tumbled.
I know you mentioned this is happening in all your machines, but have you tried a bed temp tuning print? I remember the temp tuning print was not publicly available for GF but perhaps this has changed. This might at least show you how the material behaves over a range of temps. Are the date codes on the powder all the same?
Formlabs have been trouble shooting with me for some time now but they are clueless just as me.
I go through approx 250kg per month of material so if it was connected to a certain batch, i would have noticed changes in the materials but since this problem have been consistent in the past approx 6 months.
Im stumped right now, i don´t know what else to check.
I see that there are “New” speed optimized print settings. Did you by chance change settings? I figure you probably wouldn’t and it may be more recent but worth noting if one is better than the other unless this has already been discussed as I am not a GF user.
I suppose I might revert to a firmware from back when things were working well, as an experiment. You could at least rule out the printer as the cause and move on to looking more closely at the material.
Yes i did try those but those are only available on Fuse 1+ and those settings are really bad.. Never had a good result when trying those new settings.
