I’m wondering what happens in the situation of a failed print. I recently had a large model use up 10% of the tank and fail on the first layer surprisingly but it was left for the full 15hr time.
When i went to clean the tank it was mostly just a caked on sheet which left most of the resin in the tray untouched…
After fixing and restarting it dumped another parts worth of resin in the tray. I’m curious if eventually I’ll run out of resin and then there will be a large amount of pooled resin in the tray unusable?
How does this work since the trays, tanks and everything are hardwired to know how much resin is used and deposited but can be wrong after failed prints.
Once the tray has little remaining liquid resin, you use the plastic scraper (or something comparable) to remove the caked-on solid resin from the bottom of the tray. I find it’s often easy-enough to do this with rubber nitrile gloves, by hand.
If you feel there might be some small amount of resin stuck to the build tray, you can do a “cleaning mesh” print and repeat cycles 1 and 2 one more time.
The printer does not know exactly how much resin has been used. It just has a good approximation. That approximation assumes the only resin being cured is the resin it cures, and that every time the printer attempts to cure resin, that it actually does. i.e. the printer can’t account for these kinds of (usually small) errors.
But you don’t lose any resin. The printer will attempt to fill the resin tank when the print starts, or when it’s decided to top off the tank during a print. If it doesn’t succeed, it will pop up a warning on the front panel to tell you it’s not filling. The popup gives you the option to continue to print anyway. If you continue, the print will continue. But since the printer doesn’t really know how much resin is there, and how quickly the resin flows back after a peel completes is a function of how much resin is in the tank, the printer will add a delay between layers that significantly extends print time. But as long as there’s enough resin for the print to complete, it will complete.
When you retire a resin tank, if it’s still got resin in it, you can pour that off in to the new tank.
You should have more than one resin tank, so if you want to use a different resin you can put the current tank back in its plastic caddy and swap in the new tank. Otherwise, you have clean the tank to reuse it, which is a huge PITA.
Worth noting that the amount of resin the printer thinks remains in a cartridge is mostly just “informational”, so the user can plan ahead. The printer will attempt to fill the tank no matter what the cartridge’s estimated resin level is.