Posting this here in case it can help others in the future.
The mixer on our Form 4L moves so fast that it really whips up Elastic 50A in the tank. This introduces a LOT of bubbles and froths it up. Surprisingly this doesn’t introduce part failures, but it ends up trapping bubbles inside the part, which end up making parts less optically clear.
The solution to this is to lower your wiper speeds. Below on the left is with Default settings, and on the right is with the wiper speed halved. There are still bubbles during mixing, but it’s significantly better without compromising speed too much. I know bubbles can probably be eliminated entirely if you lower the speed further.
Changed wipe speed from 600mm to 100. I might be able to increase it a bit, but it was only for a couple prints, so I haven’t really done extensive testing yet.
Thank you for posting this, I am about to try out 50A, will make sure to lower the wiper speed. I will reduce it to about 33% and post my findings. Give me a day or two, first need to clean my Wash
I notched the Autogenerate support adds quite a lot of support, is it hard to remove? I was only able to get 1L locally, so do not want to waste it on failed prints, any tips welcome
I will see if I can make small changes to the part to maybe print it flat on the build plate.
Thank you for the advice. I am more concerned about the costs of the parts when it has so many supports
As soon as had the courage to clean the wash station, I will load the 50A resin and try some small parts first. I am curious to know of anyone has some advice on Early Layer Compression settings for printing directly onto the build platform. I have these for Rigid materials but this is my first attempt at SLA printing flex materials.
Completely understand.
It tried limiting the amout of support for a part in Elastic 50A at first too but as I ended up needing to print it 4 times before I could use it in my system, it would have been cheaper to put a lot of support right away.
But I just needed one part and not a batch of part so the amount of resin wasn’t really an issue
You can get away with a lot less supports on flexible parts but it really depends on the geometry. If the part is really tall then you need more supports to battle it wobbling around.
Depending on the part I use 0.35-0.4mm touchpoint sizes but am just more careful when placing supports to make sure there are no part failures.
Always remove supports before curing otherwise it’s a nightmare.
Yes, very often. You can probably print that part more vertically to reduce the amount of supports used…but flexible resins will ALWAYS use a lot of supports. Often times supports will consume more resin than the part itself.
Do you mind sharing your ELC settings, or do you use the default settings. For Standard resin I have changed these to 0.700, 0.550 and 0.00 but would assume it may be different for Flex?
I do this to eliminate the ‘elephant’s foot’ at the base and to make it bit easier to remove.
I don’t think I have any ELC for flexible resins at the moment because it’s not as big of a problem as with rigid materials. Haven’t had any issues with part removal - just make sure you use a plastic spatula and wiggle rather than push/scrape.
Great… I will try these and post my findings. I am trying my best to find a way forward with this printer.
I would prefer to standardize on some materials, maybe two flexible and then two of the tough resins. I will keep one standard resin for first prototypes due to costs of other materials.
I think. second wash station and maybe the new Cure 2 would be good investments.
If you don’t need to run two washes simultaneously, you can also buy a spare wash bucket and inner lid to have a separate solvent/stage using the same main wash body. You just raise the basket and slide the bucket out like a drawer, and you can have one for tough resins and one for flexible resins, or even just a stage 1 and stage 2 wash bucket. A bit more tedious than having a second wash ready but it’s what I have for my home setup because I’m more space-limited.
