I’ve been printing a lot of surgical guides recently, and have been running into issue with the guides having puckers left over from support removal. I print supports with a .4 point at the lowest density possible to minimize support contact, but still end up with at least a few in areas that need to be smooth (they go flush with the patient’s teeth during surgery).
Has anyone here had good luck with a particular method for getting rid of the support marks? I know I can manually sand all the faces smooth, but this is very labor intensive and will add a decent chunk of change to my print costs for my client.
There is nothing you can do to avoid that.
Here’s the issue–
The resin is thick, and it accumulates onto corners, like where supports attach. The laser can’t be stopped from going through the layer that’s currently being printed, so that means that resin that has accumulated on the underside of prints will receive some extra curing due to the laser going through the print. That means that pretty much all bottom surfaces will have not as much detail. The really expensive printers avoid the issue by using a print head that manually places a speck of resin and curing it which means that there’s no accidental resin curing.
Anyway, the best way to minimize the issue is to orient parts so that supports are on areas that don’t have much detail and can be easily sanded down. I highly recommend getting a micro sander which will make it much faster. It helps to have the part angled so that resin is more likely to flow off the print.