Haha, I would use the fish joke. It made me laugh 
I havenāt contacted Form Labs for anything besides ordering directly for replacement parts which Iām sure is semi automated but in my experience customer service via email tends to be a frustrating and lackluster endeavor. Iād try and call somebody on the phone. Much more effective most of the time.
I purchased 3 trays with the original purchase, received them November. All 3 cracked within the first 3 times used (different resin in each, never lifted protective cover by back edge, no damage induced by cleaning, or handling. I fixed them all but only in the local area of the original cracks. I took too long to contact FL, my fault, and they sent 3 new trays, no cost, within a week or so. I showed the defective trays to and large injection molding company and their response was it was āprobablyā a combination of the wrong plastic, and mold design or loose process control of the molding. These people use acrylic in several formulations and have molded product that is significantly more complex and likely to fail. My major problem communicating with FL is that they do not seem to understand failure analysis/root cause analysis or how to implement corrective action. I sent a primer on failure modes analysis and didnāt get a response.?? Hard to fix a problem you donāt know anything about. I donāt know why many more users donāt have this problem. Maybe multi source and one is out of control. Good luck to us all.
Some of this is resin based.
I have about a liter of Formlabs resin on one tray and itās fine. Took a couple of days to destroy a tray with Makerjuice.
With that said, I might try printing a clip on reinforcement for that corner.
Do not bother to design a corner reinforcementā¦just print this one
Tray Wall Repair.form (293.1 KB)
It must be put on with the pouring area up. Sounds like a āduhaā but the sides of the tray are tapered and this design has a reverse taper so that it will match the tray wall. Use a standard 2 part epoxy for plasticsā¦even a home depot one will do. There are no extra points for neatness so make sure you have the entire surface of the bandaid covered and then use a couple of small clamps with LIGHT pressure to hold it in place. Put some of the epoxy around the junction of the lip on the tray and the one on the part.
There is one modification that you will have to do. The black tray cover needs to be cut to allow for the āextra wall thicknessā
I have 9 trays and 4 of them are cracked. I just keep fixing them. I am in the engineering dept of a plastic injection molding company. Christopher is correctā¦the cardinal rule is to keep the walls the same thickness. This is a very complex part. I know it does not look very difficult but it is. Without doing some failure analysis on the broken ones, thereās really no way to know what happened. My personal theory is that there is a vibration that the unit creates to dislodge bubblesā¦I think the frequency of that vibration is releasing internal stress created in the molding process. What Iām saying is that they will keep cracking and thereās no way to stop it without changing the design
This is an interesting theory, but Itās not clear to me how the printer physically does this. Can you elaborate?
I think it is just stress from the acrylics curing process. That stuff gets hot while it cures and the resulting heat is not even particularly in the spour spout because the plastic changes thickness there.
I am assuming that the trays are acrylic because of the optical properties that are required. They have added color to the mix which also will effect the properties. I have attached some basic guidelines that govern a design in acrylic. After having said that, sometimes I have done everything by the book and the part that come out is a disaster! It is a crystal based plastic hence the preference for optical parts. What comes with that is that it tends to crack. It is a vary complex part, as I said before, which makes the success āwindowā even smaller.
The attachment comes from the link below the JPG:
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