I don’t know if this is common, but I seem to have some kind of strange almost soapy like haziness on my optical window. Can’t clean it off nor was it there when I got the printer. I don’t 100% know if it’s the cause of some issues I’ve been having with some inaccuracies I’ve been getting very recently, but I get a nagging feeling I should remedy the problem with the optical window sooner than later.
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I have a fogging issue as well. It’s on the other side over the optical glass. Not sure what to do
My 2nd F2 came with the optical window contaminated like yours. I just noticed when I printed in that area (in my case is in a corner). Surface finish was rubbish on that area, but no failed prints though.
Support gave me the instructions to clean the optical window (you will need to remove it).
So I suggest you should contact support, they will help you with the procedure.
CPinto
@Joxol and @LiQUiD1 – we created support tickets for both of you, in case you haven’t been in touch with our support team yet. They can offer instructions for cleaning the optical window.
I’ve got 4 Form2’s and the optical glass windows are always getting ruined. Either the tank will crack and leak onto them or they will develop a streaking pattern that kind of looks like an oil slick which causes printing inaccuracies.
I’d honestly like a 10 pack of the optical glass windows since they seem to need to be replaced quite regularly.
Hey there. Do Make a ticket, if you have not already, so we can give you the instructions to clean the spill and investigate what is causing your tanks to crack.
The cracking has happened on two tanks now; causing resin loss and leakage into the printer onto optical surfaces. Reading the forum it appears that this problem is unfortunately widespread which indicates there is a manufacturing failure somewhere.
I’m starting to look into offloading my Form2’s. Its very difficult to run a business with these machines when Formlabs keeps running out of Resins and has extremely long lead times and doesn’t support any 3rd party resins. The software that runs the machines have major issues for those running a 3D printing service. The issues mostly come down to all the unnecessary warning messages. Its fine to warn you at the beginning of a print that there might not be enough resin; but after that warning message is cleared; sometimes the machine will stop an hour or so later to warn you that the tank may run dry. This causes print lines and often ruins the prints. So in order to warn you that you might have a print failure; the Form2 forces the print to fail. Nobody wants pause lines in SLA printed parts. If I clear the initial warning message why do they keep coming back? I know how much resin I need for my prints and don’t need my machines stopping in the middle of the night and creating print failures after I’ve already confirmed there is enough resin. It honestly seems like its programmed to create print failures for the purpose of going through more resin.
I saw a post on here once where somebody had a cracked tank and Formlabs acted like the tank cracked because they used a 3rd party resin, despite that the cracking tanks have become a well known issue regardless if you’re using 3rd party resins or not. Honestly reading through those responses left a bad taste in my mouth. Formlabs is free to not support 3rd party resins; but pretending like it was a 3rd party resin that caused the tank to leak seemed dishonest to me.
I have had 6 tanks to crack and spill resin onto the table, floor and printer so far with original resin(which means that not only these tanks are ruined but I throw away 200ml of resin as well). Formlabs US replaced 2 tanks, but I they didn’t want to ship outside of the US so I had to pay a forwarder big money in the end.
There were tanks that were used for only 100ml when the PDMS came loose from the acrylic but luckily I spotted this in time. I wasted a lot of money this way…
LT tanks work better, but I’m having major issues with the chip not being recognised as they don’t touch the contacts when mounted in the machine. They also get damaged easily if you have a print failure and the damage seems to be more severe than with PDMS.
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