I touched the bottom of my printbed, how do I clean it?

I just watched most of the webinar and I was hoping to learn how to really clean the printbed.

I’ve touched the bottom of the printbed by mistake when cleaning out a failed print.  How do you clean it off after that happens?

I’m getting consistent failed prints and I want to rule this out as a possibility.

Thanks for any help

What do you mean by ‘touched’? If you’ve simply touched it with your hand or lightly with the scraper, and there is no visible sign of damage, it should be more or less OK. Some photographs would be useful.

Thanks, I think I’m a bit paranoid about it.  :)  I did just lightly touch it while pulling out the bed.  I’m going to give it a serious clean out this week (i have multiple failed pints worth of tiny particles in the resin) and I’ll try and take a photo if I can.

More likely, you’ve got bits of cured resin floating around in there that is causing you issues, rather than a damaged tank. If the tank has been heavily used, it might be time for a new one. Was your printer working well prior to this last print? There could be something else amiss.

Hi Sam,

Thank you for taking this seriously.

I had a wonderful first print, then I printed two bottle openers and they had some incomplete parts, the front of both were not completely dense, so a bit of hole really.  Then I created a small multi part robot from thingiverse, it printed well, but I needed one small part to finish it, that’s the one that won’t work and has caused multiple failed prints.  It won’t stick to the build platform.

Sam

I recently received my Form1 and a few days ago I had as you several failed components/prints however I very quickly was back on track with minimal resin loss by filtering using cone and cup similar to these:

http://www.amazon.com/TCP-GLOBAL%C2%AE-Premium-Essentials-Strainers/dp/B00DP5D51I/ref=pd_sim_hi_8

That’s a great idea, Marc. That might be something you want to look at, Russell, to take of any stray bits in the tank after a print failure.

I’m thinking I might buy a cheap kitchen strainer this afternoon to start the process. :slight_smile: Thanks for the suggestion.

Just filtered the resin and had a beautiful spaceship print, about 1cm x 2cm x3cm.  Then tried the tiny robot parts and they didn’t stick to the build platform.  :frowning: aaarghh!

It seems that small parts don’t print for me.

Hmm, that’s a bit of a puzzle. Glad to hear the spaceship came out – that’s no so large itself. How small are the tiny parts? Can you share the STLs?

Thanks, I’ve attached the .stl files.

I just doubled them in size (2x with Preform) and printed all three and they seem to have printed fine.  Though I would love to find a way to print the smaller files.

Treadbot-1-Body.stl

TreadBot-1-Upper-Arm-Left.stl

TreadBot-1-Upper-Arm-Right.stl

and here is the spaceship and the robot parts at 2x

Russell

I understand the laser spots minimal cure is 300 microns (xy) at a minimal thickness (z) of 25 microns therefore any filter medium should be capable of removing these items of these dimensions or less, what’s the mesh size of the kitchen filter you used?

Anything greater than say 250 micron and you will have issues as this will prevent the build plate becoming intimate with the surface of the resin tank.

I’ve managed to print a number of larger parts successfully, but the smaller ones still elude me. :frowning: