Does anyone else have trouble with the machine smelling too much? I’ve put mine in my living room and my roommate initially had no complaints, but this morning she said the smell wasn’t tolerable and opened some doors/windows to ventilate. The machine was running a print over night, and finished around 4am.
I notice that the soft seal around the bottom of the lid doesn’t make contact in one corner on mine, and I’m wondering if changing that would make a difference.
Any tips / advice / suggestions? If there’s a hood I could put over the machine that would work for me, but if I have to connect it to a window, that probably wouldn’t work.
Your nose suffers from a phenomenon called “Olfactory Fatigue”. It’s why you can’t tell if you’ve washed that skunk smell off your dogs one night when they manage to kill one that wandered through the fence in to the back yard. After you’ve been smelling something for a while you don’t smell it as strongly. But someone who hasn’t been near the smell will still smell it really strongly (like the next day when you go to work only to find out from all your coworkers that you also smell like a skunk from trying to wash skunk smell off your dogs the night before).
My point being, it might not smell as strongly to you for reasons other than the food you cooked…
Also note that some resin is much stronger than others. For example, tough resin is noticeably more pungent than grey or clear. I first put my form2 near the living room and only had tough resin. That lasted about two days before it was overwhelming for my wife. Clear and grey have almost no scent.
FTD resin is by far the strongest smelling resin I’ve experienced. It is hard to handle in a non-vented space. Which resin were you using?
Well, from my experience, when I got my form 2 and started printing with clear resin, my wife came into the apartment and she was freaked out. She thought we left the oven running or something got burnt… Only then she realized it was my new toy
My printers are located in my “home office”. This room has 3x 4" Boxer Fans on a board inserted in the window behind my desk. With the door mostly shut (propped open a few inches) no smells from this room can escape to the rest of the house. Works great. And I’m allowed to smoke Cigars inside so long as I keep 'em in this room.
Fans run continually, all season long. Probably costs me a little extra in heat in the winter and cooling in the summer, but it’s well worth it.
If you don’t have a room you can dedicate to the printer, the “fume hood” approach might work well enough. Make a tall cardboard box open on one side, opening facing forward. Stand the printer up inside the box. Attach some 4" dryer hose ducting to an opening at the rear/bottom of the cardboard box, and run that to a nearby window where you attach it to a single 4" Boxer Fan mounted on a board, or any one of a wide selection of cheap window fans you can pick up at Wal-Mart or Target, exhausting out that window. Drape a towel over the front of the box when you don’t actually need to be touching the printer.
I moved it out of the living room and back into my bedroom. The smell doesn’t bother me, but I wonder if there’s any health concerns for someone like me, spending lots of time everyday, breathing resin fume saturated air.
For now, the solution is that I start my prints in the morning before leaving for work, rather than run them overnight in the living room. I’ll probably setup a webcam for monitoring. Not sure if the dashboard has a remote cancel feature though.
FormLabs published the MSDSs (Material Safety Data Sheet) for their resins. I can’t tell you where to find them, but that’s the resource you want to review if you’re worried about fumes…
