Form 3 Resin Tank Failure

The printer has been working great, until just the other day. We were almost through our first cartridge of black resin when the prints suddenly began to fail.

The first time looked like this:

I thought maybe the wall was to thin or my supports weren’t placed well, so I changed the model and tried again with a similar result:

Before this print I did try to scrape the bottom of the tank using the special tool, and I thought I got everything off. After the second failure I emptied the tank and found more material stuck to it, and tried to remove it all, but some appeared to be between the film layers. I took two pictures, one with my glove behind it to highlight the areas with stuck resin and some odd opaque areas:



(note I didn’t clean out all the resin, so the resin on the edges is on top of the film. However, the cured-looking resin in the middle appears to be between the film layers).

Especially after waiting months for the Form 3, it’s disappointing to see the tank fail so quickly. I’ve worked a lot with the Form 2, and never had tank issues even after multiple cartridges and a few failed prints. Any ideas what happened? Is it possible this was a faulty tank? And any comments on the true lifespan of these tanks? I was under the impression they would last longer than the Form 2 tanks. The more time goes on, the more I’m regretting purchasing this machine rather than the previous generation.

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It looks like there’s a hole/defect in the film and the film layers have delaminated around the defect allowing the resin to seep in. When my tank was new the whole film was white semi-opaque, was yours clear to begin with?

Mine was clear to begin with as far as I remember, and I got many good prints out of it before the failures. Perhaps there was a hole or defect that got worse over time. It doesn’t seem likely that we damaged the film as we didn’t mess with it at all. I wonder how your tank got through QA.

I checked with support, grey semi-opaqueness is normal.

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I just had a similar print failure. Hoping it’s not the tank. Jw did support handle this for you?

Nope, but I never submitted it to support. Probably should have.