I had previously posted about some of my issues, such as the inability to successfully print at anything other than 0.1mm, and the surface pitting issue with Black resin.
Now I’m having really bad issues with the New Grey v3. In fact, other than being able to print “some” of the butterflies in the FormLabs test, I was never able to successfully print anything else, especially if that print is taller than 400 layers, or if it has relatively thin walls (~2mm).
I currently found some old, expired Grey v2, and I still have some Clear V2 which I can successfully print with with the standard settings for that resin. I still have issues printing at 0.05mm, but at 0.1mm the prints are fine, and don’t exhibit the pitting I saw with the black resin.
To make matters worse, FormLabs is no longer offering the other greys for sale, only v3. I’m not sure where the reasoning for that move came from, not everyone likes a matte finish, but that’s where it’s going. Every time they release a new resin version, the previous version are gone.
Now for the interesting part. I was watching the printing routine that the new grey v3 has, and I’m not sure if anyone else noticed, but after the vat returns after the peel process, the laser doesn’t actually start drawing for quite some time, for the base layers, that delay appears to be about 13-14 seconds, and for the model, it varies from about 7 seconds in the early layers, to about 1-2 seconds at the end. I also noticed that the layer counter number on the display doesn’t increase until the laser actually start drawing. So the vat drops, then comes up, then there’s the delay, then the layer number changes and the laser starts drawing.
This routine seems to be the reason the prints take much longer to print with V3 that V2, I don’t know if this is the behavior that other are seeing, but this is what my Form 1+ does.
So I thought I’d try something else last night. Instead of printing with the correct profile, I selected Black v1, because it’s supposed to have a longer exposure time, and printed the same part that had failed twice earlier with the Grey v3 profile. The print was successful, although there was some pitting on the near vertical sides of the model. So then I tried Black v2, which has a longer exposure time, the part came out nearly flawless, although there is still some very minimal pitting, but a lot less than the previous test.
So all this brings up the question, is it just me, or are others affected similarly?
Is there a way to either increase the power of the laser (trim pot & voltage measurements?), or the exposure time, without resorting to OpenFL, which to this date, I still don’t know how to use, primarily because FormLabs has not posted any INI information except for the Clear.