I took this up with the company in Britain that supplied my Form2 (Creat3D), and their customer services was excellent. I have another tank being sent to me.
Instead of injection molding the tanks out of acrylic, why not make them in one piece with a urethane? At least it would be IPA proof and less likely to shatter.
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I just had the same problem with a tank that held Castable V2 for 8 months.
The support team says that the Castable is known to damage the tank after +2months of exposure. LT is supposed to more resilient.
They shipped me a new tank immediately, thanks to Formlabs for that!
Still: 2 months is not a long time, especially with Castable. And emptying / cleaning a tank and storing the resin somewhere is a very unpleasant thing to do.
As I was writing this post, I was printing a prototype with the White resin. And again: Resin spilled due to a leaky tank. I had huge luck that I noticed it before it run onto the mirror.
just had the same issue (7-6-2020) on a tank I bought earlier this year, had only one liter of draft resin go through…first of 4 tanks to do it…but I’m not sure If I’ll be leaving them in the machine from now on…
We too had issues with draft resin in the tank. Unfortunately the draft resin does cause the PDMS to swell after a period of time. Its fine if you only leave the resin in the tank for 24 hours (or so) but if you leave it in much longer the PDMS swells and the force in the x/y plane causes it to become detached from the tank.
It is something that can be repeated - if you have an old tank, remove the PDMS and cut a 10mm x 30mm strip. Measure the thickness (use a micrometer for best accuracy) and then immerse the strip in some of the resin. Leave it in the resin for several days and then clean it up and measure the thickness again. After 96 hours of immersion we could measure a growth in thickness of around 5% consistently (repeating the test with PDMS from different old tanks)
The rest of the tank do not "grow when exposed to the resin, so the extra forces caused by the growth of the PDMS have to go somewhere and this results in visible ripples in the PDMS and it then detaching from the tank. If the seal on the window is not intact (its often not a water tight seal) its going to allow the resin to spill into the printer.
Best not to store the tank after use in the printer OR with any resin in it.
I’ve never had any of these issues with LT tanks on any of the engineering resins…and those tanks were maybe 1 year old and always stored with resin. IMO the LT tanks are well worth the incremental cost.
I totally agree - due to the fact that PDMS is not used in the LT tanks they are worth every penny extra!!
It is better to avoid those orange tanks. Very problematic and dangerous. Use the LT tanks instead.