I recently got the elastic resin and brand new LT tank and have had nothing but failures in trying to print.
I have cleaned the optical window, adjusted the z height and all I can get at best is the base of the raft.
Im at a loss what to do. My model is small and ive used the auto generate raft and supports.
Is anyone having success in printing with this material?
I also tried the High temp resin a few months back and the same issues. This is very frustrating as I’ve only used the printer a hand full of times. Do the engineering resins have high failure rates or something?
Tried Durable resin today with a new tank and cleaned optical window and yet the same issues, the raft partially prints with some supports but its a mess with most everything else getting stuck to the tray.
I’m so sorry to hear you’re having some issues with your recent prints! That’s absolutely not the experience we want anyone to have.
It sounds like you may want to get int ouch with our support team here. They’ll be able to dig into what might be going on and how we can help, because that’s definitely not expected behavior.
Thanks I have contacted support awaiting to hear back.
I noticed that after each layer when the wiper swipes, it moves a lot of resin out of the way and the build platform comes down before all the resin is level, covering the tank then a lot of air seems to be getting trapped while the laser starts again.
You can see the results of a new tank, new resin. And you can see bubbles formed on the build platform.
The guys in the support team are truly amazing helped me get the printer up and running again. Probably be best after sales support I’ve seen in a company.
Durable resin worked but alas the elastic resin never did. If you can’t print your model directly on the build platform dont even try the supports they always failed on me so the organic shape i needed never came out. I think if they could increase the diameter of the supports then that would defiantly solve the issue. Other wise you’d have to generate your own manually in cad.
I recently started printing in elastic. I had a ~50% fail rate on much larger prints than this. 100-170mL. The failures looked identical to the ones seen here. The issue for me was the optical window. The tank facing side I always keep as clean as possible so looking directly at it, I would have never guessed that it was the issue. The contamination was on the back side or optical mirror facing side. After removing the optical window and holding it a certain way in lighting it look like someone had sneezed on it. It was invisible when directly looking at it due to a coating on the window. After spending close to an hour cleaning it my prints in all my materials have drastically improved in success and surface quality. I have not had an elastic failure since. I would highly recommend cleaning the back side of this window in accordance with formlabs instructions.
Yes they did my prints were fully suspended with full rafts. I never had any success with anything smaller than .55mm. That being said i have had more success with A LOT of small suppots over larger supports.
One observation I had that will kill an elastic print every time is two bodies forming separately and then joining. So if you were printing a model of the letter ‘Y’. It will always fail if printed upside down. But if printed upright it will be fine.
