How do you filter your resin tanks?

General Discussion
1

Here is another request for feedback—this time, it’s about filtering resin tanks. For those of you who have needed to filter your resin tank, what has that experience been like?

How frequently do you find you need to filter your resin tank? After a failure? After only a very bad failure?
Do you find that some resins require filtration more than others?
What tools do you use to filter your resin? What is your process?

Please specify which printer you are using (Form 1, Form 1+, Form 2) and which resins you are using.

For me, I filter my resin using a DeKones 190 micron fine conical paint strainer with a plastic solo cup underneath. To get the resin completely out of the tank, I use a business card (which is just the right size for the resin spout on the Form 2 tank). When printing fine detail models in castable resin at 25µm, I filter after every dozen prints or so. For general purpose resins, I will only filter after a very bad failure. I had my first failure in many months today, when printing a solid part in grey resin with support touch points that were way too small.

Thanks!

2

It is pretty dreadful draining a tank- I did several with the form1+. It is difficult to prevent contact with the bottom of the tank and I never got around to designing any kind of stand for drainage.

I would generally ask someone else to hold the tank and they would inevitably touch the optical area while I scraped it clean…

1 Like
5

At Formlabs, we recommend filtering the resin in your tank after any failure that you’re not 100% confident that you’ve captured all of the debris from.

Any one looking to learn about cleaning resin tanks and filtering resin should check out our video for cleaning debris in the resin tank for both the Form 4 and Form 4L.

While this video is Form 4 generation-centric, the practices are applicable across all of our SLA printers. I hope it helps!

6

I use these scraperson all the resin tanks so i dont scrape the bottom

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