I just had a very strange experience. Printing a full flex build plate on a Form4 with Tough2k V2. I have a custom “print on bed” profile which can result in some adhesion reduction but keeps the dimensions from blowing past tolerance on the first few layers. In the cases where this part has failed in the part (e.g. 1 or 2 out of 10 on a build plate, but not every print), I have had the print fail when the wiper hits the part as it sticks to the tank film. Print a cleaning sheet, remove cleaning sheet from tank and parts from build plate and start again.
But this time, the print finished “successfully” with two parts missing. These parts are over 30mm tall and have around 25 x 15 mm in contact with the build plate. After a few millimetres in height, their cross-sectional area drastically reduces for the remainder of the print.
I assumed that those two parts had failed below the height at which the wiper would hit the part and throw a debris-in-tank error. But when I printed the cleaning sheet and cured it, there was absolutely no sign of those two parts.
Has something like this ever happened to anyone else? Any clue what could have happened here?
@smerrett I’m sorry to hear that you’ve experienced an unexplained print failure. For starters, I’d suggest updating to the latest firmware 1.15.0, which can help with false debris detection. Secondly, I’d Inspect the Backlight Unit and Light Processing Unit. If you would share those findings, and possibly your .form file, I’d be happy to do a bit more digging here, before suggesting you open a support case. Feel free to do that if you would like. We’re all happy to help where we can.
Hi @jessbuck I repeated the same print and it failed once more - this time I inspected the bottom of the tank and found the detached parts with my plastic scraper, so they were probably there on the first print but became “invisibly” incorporated with the tank cleaning sheet. I then conducted a print of a different model, also filling the build-plate, and a couple of these parts that use default curing profiles also failed. So perhaps I had a contaminated flex plate in those two spots. A reprint of the different model has been successful and I have been careful not to wash the flex plate so hopefully the contamination, whatever it was, has been pulled clear by that successful print. I will retry the original print and see what happens now.
@smerrett I’m glad that you probably found the source of the issue. I look forward to hearing how the next run turns out.
Quick update - the debris detection found a couple of failed prints of the second print I thought had been fully successful (they were hidden in the forest of other parts, and weren’t along the outer row). I then printed my original batch again and had parts fail in the same place, although the debris error was thrown at the end of the print (but many parts did print successfully). I have now rotated my bed in Preform and am re-printing that original batch, so that the troublesome part is away from the troublesome area - we will see how that goes.