Here’s their list:
PROS
Ease of use
Print quality
Design
Software
Precision
CONS
Running costs
Reliability
Material availability
Print speed
It would be awesome to tackle those cons. ‘Prints speed’ brings me back to my earlier request for a faster layer setting. So easy, yet brushed under the rug.
The tilt mechanism is what hurts the speed. If the vat was flexible for example, the upwards motion of the build platform could be enough for separation, and the tilt may not be needed. That will speed up things quite a bit.
That and printing the rafts and the first few mm of the supports before you hit the model at a lowest resolution and then switch to the high resolution.
Great idea with the low res supports! Easy one to setup in the software without needing to redesign hardware.
I believe they missed a trick though. The customer service and support was one of the major pro’s for me when selecting a printer.
@Monger_Designs, You are half way to a great idea as I see it… But anything that flexible would not spring back to flat. Or would sag from gravity. Let’s reverse the idea. Eliminate the tilt motor and reverse the tank hinge. Then between layer the platform simply raises. When a sensor detects the tank has fallen, bring the platform into place. It would save time because the peel would not need to continue un-necessarily like it does now. Right now they need the full motion because they don’t know when the platform has detached. This eliminates the spendy stepper motor on the tank and saves peel time. And as an added kicker, it would be the perfect angle-to-lift ratio they are going for. If your print is near the hinge, the tilt ratio should be higher. If it is on the far side, the tilt ratio would be lower. No complex math, just let it peel itself.
Flexible vats don’t save you from failures with big prints.
If you look at the printers currently on market, the ones that use flexible vats (or vats with a flexible bottom) are typically very very tiny build-volume-wise (for a reason).
Flexible vat is a cheaper and simpler, not necessarily better solution.
Peeling forces are huge and go up with build cross-section almost exponentially (not mathematically true, but you get my point). There is simply no way around a peel with current tech (unless you switch to a top-down system, which has its own pitfalls - resin expenses being the foremost).
JoshK’s idea seems interesting though and might be worth investigating / experimenting with. The tank couldn’t be completely passive, though, as the height of the move would have to be too big for a peel and would run an increasing risk of breaking an object off the supports or the platform.