I had a tank fail a couple weeks ago and fill the inside of the printer with resin. I’ve been in contact with support as to how to get back up and running again and still have one unsolved problem. There is a bunch of resin under the black plate you can see at the bottom of the inside of the printer.
I’ve tried removing the 6 hex bolts on the bottom of the printer. The front two allow me to remove the front panel and the other four let me remove the side panels, but that doesn’t get me any closer to where I can get rid of the resin trapped in the bottom.
I’m inclined to just try to flush the bottom of the printer with IPA and let it drain and air dry and otherwise give up.
What has anyone else done to clean up after an internal resin spill?
P.s. I continue to be amazed that this is Form’s third model and it STILL doesn’t drain to either outside the printer or into an alarmed resin trap.
So we never did figure out how to get directly at the resin that had pooled in the bottom level (under the black plate you can see under the LPU). We did go after the muffin fan that you can see in the back center with lots of IPA, towels and an old paint brush soaked with IPA. We got it as clean as it’s going to get. For the rest, we just tipped the printer on its side with the side panels removed for a few minutes and then went after what we could get to.
Lastly, resin badly contaminated the roller assembly on top of the LPU. Once off, that assembly is fairly easy to disassemble further so you can thoroughly clean the rollers themselves and the plastic frame and thin plastic “holder-inner”.
We thought we did a good enough job on the glass - we picked off the spilled resin that had cured (that was easy) and then went after it all with IPA, but the first prints after doing so were not as good as before. Support suggested PEC-PADs to clean it further. We went to a local camera store and got a pack of those and some LensBright cleaning fluid (the folks at the store said that was made by the same folks who make the PEC-PADs). We went after the glass with one more pass of IPA, and soap and water, then wiped it clean with a PEC-PAD, then used some of the lens cleaner on both sides and dried with another PEC-PAD and the difference is completely astounding. If you need to clean the glass, that combination is highly recommended.
Support also sent us a link to a document that outlined the roller assembly replacement procedure. Reading that procedure is recommended, because they had a specific order they wanted you to torque the bolts that hold that assembly down - presumably so that it doesn’t get warped.
Glad you were able to recover from that spill. I’ve been concerned about tank failures, too. I dropped a thumbscrew washer under the bottom plate while setting up my Form3. Support told me there is no way to access that area. So, I’m also surprised that Formlabs hadn’t designed some way to catch as spill or recover from a spill. Very user “unfriendly”.
I posted a question about getting heatmaps for the Form3 tanks, but haven’t had any replies. I’d be curious if you know what your heatmaps were showing? Seems like heatmaps are on the Dashboard, but I haven’t seen any for my tanks. Maybe, they’re only available for Form2 tanks?
I knew that that one spot was… questionable and had been avoiding it (it was sort of near the back-center, so just keeping to the front was mostly easy), but the 2nd to last print happened to have a few layers that were basically most of the build area, so I’m fairly certain that that’s what was the inciting incident. What I’m less certain of is how that would have caused the bottom film to fail.
I sent the tank back to Form for them to look at. Maybe they’ll have some insight when everyone is back to work later this week.