We’ve had a Form 2 for about 1.5 years. It used to be a workhorse that never failed. Over the past 3-6 months failures have been increasing and it’s to the point that I can hardly get a model to print without failing. Even “successes” have major defects that compromises the usability of the prints. Defects range from bulges of excess material to (of course) missing chunks.
We print in a variety of materials, but primarily tough, grey, and rigid. The big difference that I can see is that we’ve phased out all of our standard build tanks and moved to almost exclusively LT. On paper, they’re much more economical. I feel like the LT tanks may be generating peel problems because of the prevalence of missing chunks and patches of cured material that I have to peel off of the tank window after the print is “done”. Are the LT tanks the problem? What a waste of money if they are. Are the newer firmware/preform print settings worse? Not sure what to do.
Co-worker accidentally printed this with “mini rafts”. In this particular case, it may have contributed to the failure, but this is the first model that we’ve ever printed with “mini rafts”. Plenty of failures from other print settings.
This is almost certainly a case for a support ticket, and gradual declines in performance like this are almost always a result of the gradual accumulation of contamination on the parts of the optical path. If parts of your prints are coming out crisp but others aren’t, you may be able to get away with just cleaning your window and main mirror thoroughly, but I imagine you may need to clean your galvanometer mirrors as well. Support can give you the instructions for cleaning those components.
I think the same issue is happens to me right now, dont have the full picture yet as i’m still running test to eliminate that is not the LT tank and the build platform or glass cleaning.
Can you please direct to the instructions?
In my country you cant get support from Formlabs unless you pay for a year of support and this is cost a lot of money. The support is a third party company that gives the support to SolidWorks software as well. We had a support for the first 1 year and this is ended.
In the center of ‘blue’, there is an empty spot where you can see a large area of aluminum from the build platform. Are there supposed to be support structures that did not adhere to build platform in this area?
If so, maybe you can lower the Z value of your build platform?
Can you please direct to the instructions?
In my country you cant get support from Formlabs unless you pay for a year of support and this is cost a lot of money. The support is a third party company that gives the support to SolidWorks software as well. We had a support for the first 1 year and this is ended.
Even without paid support, you should be able to put in a Support Request here https://support.formlabs.com/s/new-request?language=en_US asking for the Galvanometer Mirror cleaning instructions, and have someone get back to you.
There’s still some “flashing” around the base of your parts, which can indicate stray light from contaminated optics. If there’s flashing there around the raft, that same problem will contribute to rough edges and not-empty-enough cavities on all the subsequent layers. The cavities might also suffer from cupping problems, but any effect from that should be very small compared to the optical problems.
I am having the same problem with my printer. Mostly using the grey pro now as it seems to be more reliable but seeing a lot of failed prints still. Did you find a fix for this?
The material that should have been printed where the void is seen, is printed straight onto the glass of the tank
