Every single print from the day first of having the printer is disaster. Surface is covered in lines, Now - it seems like melted area. We haven’t managed to make any proper print.
Glass is clear, resin tank is clear, resin is filtrated and nothing changes. We were changing the angle of prints, high, position - nothing seems to help. The layers are sometimes “melted” , they come of like scales.
The printer also some time ago decided to put the resin everywhere but in the resin tank. It was in the service. Nothing happened since then.
We are using high-temp. And we are just tired of trying…
Are these medallions or ornaments double sided, or do they have a flat surface? If they do have a flat surface, have you tried printing them flat, directly on the build surface?
You can try that, and see if the top surface is free from these artifacts. Then the back side can be sanded smooth and polished.
The only consideration when doing this is vertical/thickness accuracy. Depending on your printer, the print may be anywhere from .2 to .5mm undersized, due to compression that occurs for the first 20-30 layers, but otherwise it should be OK. I’ve printed many single sided relief prints like yours in this fashion and they came out great.
The last picture you can see is the object oriented in flat (see those soft letters? In cpu - they are straight and simple). We have tested all kinds of angles, and all kinds of areas in “workplace”. After that “moulded” “rubber” in the last pic you see we have also made 2 pin badges also oriented in flat. One of them is completly lacking measures. It is just weird. The second one came out with scales that falles off.
PS: 2 hours ago we tried to print the same pin badge - but oriented vertical. It didnt even appear After printing ended - there was only some supports with nothing else.
From the first image the issue I can tell you is that the parts are unstable, because you have the part oriented vertically and it’s thin and you have the supports just going up the sides it will easily flex from side to side as it prints which can make the layers misalign. Also, it looks like you have just one support on the lowest point which will also contribute to making the parts unstable. I would angle it slightly and put supports on the flat back (where you can easily sand it smooth) and spread them out evenly so that it’s more stable while printing, also make sure you have a couple more supports closer to the starting point so that it’s secure at the start.
The second pictures shows a portion of supports on the right side that are missing. I assume this is one of the main places all of the debris came from. If you are filtering the resin through a 190 micron filter, then the debris must be coming from the current print. I don’t know why that portion of the support is missing, very odd. You should definitely orient them per Zachary’s suggestion to improve stability and get rid of those layer misalignments.
Could you clarify what is wrong in the MCC MEDALE picture? I don’t follow your recent post discussing it.
Like I said - we have tried all angles, increasing amount of supports, and making them wider. Nothing really help. From vertical to horizontal - all prints are crap.
We have printed 30-50 pieces so far. The number is not high, but none of them were acceptable. Zero. The main problem is the flat surface - there is no way tu orient flat surface. 90, 45, 20, 180, 15 angles - nothing changes. Lines, layers that don’t “stick” together or the “melted” area.
MCC MEDALE was printed in flat, with loads of supports on the other side. You can see that the left part of that piece is melted. All the angles are soft , and rubber-like. It only printed 15% “well” on the right side.
I guarantee you from those first pictures that those parts are unstable and will flex during printing which causes those lines. I don’t know what other stuff you’ve tried, but those that you have posted are not stable enough.
Are you able to upload a .form file for one of the parts that’s causing issue? We sometimes see these sorts of artifacts with coplaner faces or other mesh errors though based on your parts, it’s tricky to judge whether that’s what’s happening here. Thanks for the troubleshooting and iterating you’ve done so far. If the .form files aren’t suspect or you’re unable to send them over, I’ll make sure to get you in touch with our support team so that we can troubleshoot this with you.
So u r saying, that whole Preform is not telling whole truth? Program itself generates supports - and we did’t make them smaller or less. We rather make them bigger and also add few more. Also - if we were trying to remove supports - jobs were just not printable.
You can get better results by orienting the object and placing supports yourself, the automatic option is for convenience but isn’t going to do as good of a job as a person.
How are you producing your STL files?
The lines on these pieces look like you have co-incedent faces in you model.
I would also suggest you filter your resin in 180 grit paint filter and possibly use a new tray. You could also check the the optical window under the tray is clear and has no blooms or smears on it.
- Microsoft 3d builder
- 3d max
- Zbrush
We have tried all those programs. No differents in quality. Sry but what do you mean by “co-incedent faces” ?
Coincident faces are 2 faces that occupy the same space (in whole or in part).
For example, you can have 2 solids (cubes) that have been mated to each other on a side. The faces that are mated together occupy the same space, so unless you merge (boolean) the 2 parts, they will always have what appears to be a common wall, but in fact are two walls, occupying the same space.
Both 3DS Max and ZBrush will produce models that have intersecting faces and coincident faces and they don’t care, however, neither one of these programs is very good at generating a Boolean’ed STL, meaning a STL that is made of a single contiguous solid.
I’m not that familiar with ZBrush, but 3DS Max has some built in tools to check and fix the mesh before is exported. but I didn’t find it to work all that well. More often than not you will have to use other tools like NetFabb, MeshMixer or MeshLab to clean up the models, before they are ready for printing.
Does PreForm ask to fix the STL models when you import them? If so, that’s a sign there’s something wrong with them.
I really don’t think this looks like an instance of the coincident faces issue.
You don’t need to use booleans, if you have a separate mesh that’s a detail on top of another mesh then that separate mesh just needs to extend a little bit into the other object and it will be treated as one single object in Preform.
It doesnt seems like it depends on stl files - cause we dont have issues with that part. Also there is no difference when PreForm fix files or don’t - surfaces are still disasters. Imported files from windows 3d builder are just cylinders - images 1 & 2 - there were no problems to import such files into PreForm and you can see what happened.
Bases on the images and .form file, it looks like there’s something else going on here. Our support team is going to be best suited to help out with this and one of our members will be in touch over email.
For your knowledge - our printer is now in hands of support team in my country. I am trying to get as much help as I can get - so I’m asking every way how to get form2 to work :).
Support team managed to create proper prints with standard resin. They also have our resin + resink tank. I hope that they will manage to make proper testing and find cause of problems.