Excess resin, how to use it?

[kevinduhe]

Making a long story short, the owner of my company decided to condense the lab area while I was out to make room for his new project. He took 3 clear resin trays, condensed the resin into one and threw the other two out.

So I was left with one tray nearly to the brim. I emptied it out into a separate container, filtered it with a strainer and poured some back in, up to the fill line.

My question is, i have quite a bit of excess resin. I can’t pour it back into a cartridge because of the tracking involved. So what do I do with it? Use in open mode?

[Randy_Cohen]

Unless something’s changed recently, you can absolutely pour it back in to a cartridge. I’ve done it many times. The printer complains a few times that the cartridge is low, but you can tell it to ignore that and it goes ahead and prints and still tries to dispense resin like the cartridge has resin in it still. Which it will if you refill it. I ran about 2.5l of resin through my first cartridge, to use up some older Tough I’d bought for my Form1 (but could never get to work on my Form1, though it works great on the Form2).

[FredB]

You can store the excess resin in a bottle and print small parts with it in open mode. A pop bottle in a dark place works fine.

Pouring back into the cartridge will screw up the estimate of material used. Adding to an empty cartridge is an option.

[Frew]

Yikes… We don’t recommend re-filling cartridges unless absolutely necessary. That said, cartridges can be re-filled and you will receive a ‘cartridge may not have enough resin to complete print’ error that can be bypassed. If a cartridge is overused, it will display an overused error which cannot be bypassed (this is usually after 2L-3L of resin).

[kevinduhe]

I know you “can” pour it back in the cartridge, but I also knew it wasn’t recommended. I was more wondering what the recommended answer was. @Frew Do you feel my case is absolutely necessary? How else would I use the resin if I didn’t refill a cartridge. In other words…what is the recommended advice from FL in my case?

[mlabird]

I also, pour my resin back into the cartridge, I do take one additional step and use a paint filter and funnel. the paint filter is there to catch any hardened resin that might be still in the tray. Yes, after about a 1 1/2 additional liters have been replaced in the cartridge you will come to the end of life for that cartridge. (I have had no printing issues with this process.)

[kevinduhe]

Yep yep, I have now double filtered it, put back into cartridge and hit resume on the warning that it might be out of resin soon. crosses fingers

I guess I was mostly wondering what the official recommendation would have been in my case…as I know what is not recommended.

[Frew]

This is a pretty unusual case but our support team’s recommendation would be to pour excess resin into the tank when the cartridge empties (Form 1/1+ style). Pouring back into the cartridge will work but does come with increased risk of things like resin contamination or bite valve wear.

[kevinduhe]

Thanks for the advice @Frew and everyone else . I was debating which route to go. If I were setting a print over night I would have gone with your former recommendation. Since I am printing now at work and can check on it very often I went with the later.