I have quite literally never had a print fall off the build plate in the two years I’ve owned my F3. But I just ran my first print with the new flexy build plate and two of the 8 objects I was trying to print were stuck to the resin tank film and jamming the wiper, which of course means the print had to be aborted.
I figured there might be some Z-height differences between the old build plate and new, and that the new one might need to be just a little closer to the bottom of the tank, so I went back to Preform to tweak the Z-Compression Correction parameter.
But that parameter is greyed out and cannot be changed.
I can swap back to my never-failed-me-before original build platform, but if I can get some help from FL on tweaking the Z-Compression maybe I can try this print again with the new build platform.
The adjustment you’ll want to make would be via the Z-axis Fine Tuning on the printer touchscreen - see Correcting non-adherence. This will offset the Z-axis height during the print. The Z-Compression Correction adjustment in PreForm varies the thickness of the offset layer placed under parts when printing with “None” Rafts. This wouldn’t be applicable for Full or Mini Rafts, and this wouldn’t adjust the Z-axis movement of the build platform. Hope this helps - let me know if you’d like me to clarify further!
Thanks. Done! Kicked off a print. We’ll see how it comes out…
I have noticed what I think is a FW bug, too, BTW. Two out of three times now, my printer has appeared to hang on the “checking optics” step (2/6). The first time it happened (yesterday), I wasn’t really sure how long I’d been waiting before I hit ABORT. But after hitting ABORT and then hitting CANCEL, the printer immediately went in to the resin heating step. The next print job didn’t seem to do it. But I needed to cancel it because I hadn’t gotten all the cured resin off the tank bottom and the wiper decoupled. Then I posted the question, above and waited. Now, the job I just started did it again. Waited about 3 or 4 minutes at step 2/6 before hitting ABORT. I then immediately hit CANCEL and the printer went right in to the pre-heat and now it’s filling the tank to run the print.
I’m thinking it had already started the pre-heat but the display didn’t update for the state change.
In terms of the firmware bug, me and Jesse are definitely noticing an uptick in reports like in this forum thread with similar symptoms. For clarification, is this on the latest firmware (1.20.9), and on an early Form 3 model?
Hey Randy, i got my platform too and was about to do my first test print today! Maybe I can hold on until you come back with your test results and settings!
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s any way to know in advance if you will need to tweak the Z axis like I did. You’re going to have to run a print and see what happens. I recommend you cover the build plate with lots of small objects (with small bases that don’t connect to any other base) to make sure you have good adhesion everywhere. The prints that fell off my build plate on my first print run were mostly along the front edge of the plate. But I lost one kind of in the middle/right as well.
The recommended change is 50µm at a time. But I did 100 figuring an extra 50µm wouldn’t break anything and at worst, I’ll end up with bases a tiny bit thinner than they’re supposed to be. I didn’t want to have another failure and need to be scraping the bottom of the resin tank to peel up the stuck-on detritus.
The parts didn’t just fall off the plate when I flexed it. But they required only the minimum of manual encouragement to break free. And I’d rather they be stuck on a little better than they need to be, than stuck on less.
Also, looks like I didn’t get all the cured resin off the bottom of the tank from the initial failure. I printed 8x of the same thing and 2 of them in the front row were incomplete. NBD.
What matters is that the flex plate issue is solved for sure. I did not need to use my 7" long rapier-sharp “Insulation Knife” to lever any of the prints off the plate, like I have to do with my older normal build plate.
Kind of OT, sorry. But if you could entertain my question.
Does the new platform get resin under the flexible metal sheet? Can you reuse the platform for different resins or is it essentially committed to a resin like a tank kind of is?
Resin definitely gets under the plate, between it and the plastic part of the build plate “assembly”. But the flex plate comes off and the plastic appears to be ABS, both can be cleaned with IPA when switching resins.
Though, I’m not sure it matters given the minimum amount that could be transported. On the old build plate, I switched resins without wiping down the build plate, all the time…
