Have picked up an 2nd hand Form2 with not a lot of hours on it.
But printing on it has been a mare. Got one test print off it with a little cylinder, but am running this in Openmode with 3rd party resins and I’m getting nothing now.
This was a little box that had an open top about 15mm square. You can just see the square base at the centre with the halo of resin around the outside.
The prints have weird thin halo around the object being printed as if the laser is making a halo around the object, but I don’t think it’s the glass or laser. Have run it in the dark without the bed on and the laser appears to be working fine. Have cleaned the glass too, but it wasn’t very dusty at all.
Generally the objects don’t print in their entirety and they look all blurry and lumpy if they do print at all. Some don’t even stick to the bed.
What should I do to identify where the failure is?
Third-party resins often need custom exposure times that differ from Formlabs’ profiles. If your resin is underexposed, you’ll get blurry, incomplete, or “halo” prints like you described. Check the resin manufacturer’s recommended settings and manually tweak laser power/exposure times if possible.
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Thanks but I don’t seem to be able to change the exposure in OpenMode, so… get a cartridge and hack the chip?
Can’t really hack the chip unless you’re a pretty capable software / hardware engineer, but there are universal resin chips for sale on tindie.com etc.
I just got a secondhand form 2 as well i am waiting on some resin, I messed up the spring loaded plate though so I will have to calibrate.
There was a resin spill in mine so I had to take the entire thing apart (like, totally deconstruct it, bull the motherboard, wash it in alcohol) - I noticed that the main mirror was super duper dusty. Might want to check out your mirrors.
