Hi guys,
i bought a used and thanks to the delivery service and previus owners sub ottimal packing lets just call it abused Form 2… safe to say its had some previus amature interaction and potentialy botched laser replacement, so below are the fixes and possible assumptions that may be wrong.
Also just to note i have done extensive research prior to reaching out..
- Laser it appaears that the prevus owner swapped out the laser for a brass bodied one partialy threaded in and flopping arround loose althout this did manage to do a test print for the optical test but only the towers at each corner! so what i have done to this so far is actually calibrated it focused it to 14 inches now I’ve done this from the lasers lens not the actual aperture ie the black anodised body of the laser module the laser is screwed into… this may e my first assumption that is incorrect? anyway that is done and lightly bonded in with a dab of nail polish so can some one please confirm the actual distance from laser immision lens to vat surface ? (i will try and do this later today for my varification although my printer is obviusly not ideal).
- Galvo calibration was off… so i did that by doing a very basic file in cad a thin wall box with a cross shaped thin wall in the centre to ensure the galvos are aligned with the platform surface… safety note it appears the galvos / laser prior to moving as i recalled a test lase off platform to the side so always have laser googles on and ensure room is absent from anyone without them i also advise having the lid down and always doing the adjustments from the front of the machine… so thats all done.
- Print surfce leveling in respect to platform, many ways to skin the cat and i have tested all of them but some requre the printer actualy working so heres mine… buy yourself a 10mm ground shaft set zero offset on the z height adjustment (!! this needs califying by someone with a tuned known working printer!!) so after that you set it on open mode don’t have a vat in just set it off let it go to the first layer and pull the plug when the laser first starts… so we take our (still to be confirmed) 10mm bar and roll it between the platform surface and vat attachment surface… do this until all feel the same adjusting the screws after doing a few rounds it will affect opposite sides but you should get there fairly soon… (i did try the drill holes in the old vat and adjust until it feels right method even with a surface plate and all my metrology gear out and i wasn’t super happy with that) so thats done.
- the wire fix under the aforementioned vat surface this is a common issue with the wires under this abrading and causing erroneous error regarding vat being removed and eventually heater not being able to heat tank all resolved a note on top of that is the wire may not actually be exposed I had a wire with a fatigue failure so that was fun.. also the pins that interact with the vat needed re preloading as the right most one tended to say down… most probably from previous abuse…
- build plate not being flat, so the failure mode of my printer is the prints mostly work on the outer corners nut it has yet to print in the middle at all ! so I figured it may be due to platform having a concave surface causing an air pocket or something so I did try to print off level etc but didn’t help so I just inverted my surface plate and sanded it flat always rotating etc after that I verified it was indeed flat and parallel with the top surface using dial indicator with micron deviations (yes I got a bit keen…) I then keyed up the surface to help with adhesion. so thats all done.
- Cartridge constantly not being read and intermittent… this was down to the bracket holding the Pcb not being totally 90 degrees to the cartridge mounting surface… thats done.
So I may have missed some other things and I cleaned all the optical surfaces… what I ideally need from someone is the print platform to vat mounting surface distance they currently have, I would love to get this old abused machine going ! the previous owner clearly had issues because all the print history was just non stop optical tests cording to his vats heat maps… I don’t tend to give up and I don’t tent to send things to an oem to fix.
materials I’m using brand new vat new old ish stock durable resin…
Just a note for FL I think if a printer becomes affectively eol just release the information to fix them heck maybe the source… you have clearly strayed from this legacy galvo technology it would be an awesome pr move and as a fellow electromechanical / firmware architect its what I encourage and it gets our consumers fired up !