Premature Tank Aging with Grey V3

About 2/3rds through the first 1L Grey v3 resin, I am having print failures that I would normally see with an old tank. While it is true that I don’t hollow my dental models, I don’t have this rapid aging with the Clear V2. When I light+Vacuum post-cure the Grey V3, the results are gorgeous, and I do realize that the grey and black are harder on the EPDM, but, even reducing the exposure time with 25u print settings (which means 8+ hours wait for possible disappointment), this still occurs.

Is the accuracy so much poorer with the Clear V2 (50u) that I should stick with the Grey V3 (or soon to appear dental stone beige?)? Do we know much about the dimensional differences / accuracy from one resin to another (after post-cure?

So long as all of your prints aren’t localized to the same area, you should comfortably get 2 liters of resin out of a tank and certainly shouldn’t be observing failures after 1. Can you upload some images of your PDMS clouding? 25 micron print settings are actually going to put the greatest amount of wear on the PDMS. 25 micron printing will cause the same area to require 4 times as many laser passes as an equivalent 100 micron print. Because laser exposure does not scale linearly with layer height, this means that 25 microns will put more wear on the tank.

Thanks. I definitely make a big deal about moving the prints around to minimize the clouding. I think there is a reasonable debate in the resin science world between the number of passes / peels (25u), vs. the localized intense curing heat buildup and peel effort with the 100u. I just tried to print with a tank that was dedicated to the Flexible and had only one prior, very small run (after thoroughly re-mixing and insuring the EPDM was clear). I found, like many of the prior failures on my recently factory refreshed F1+, that most failures were near the end, or at least 2/3 through. Up until that point, the recent flexible print was going just great. The print was set up with the software proposed settings. The problem is associated with the flash or scum others have complained about. There were no initial accuracy problems, and the print was done @100u. This points more to things like the resin heating (leading to increased sensitivity), or other non user issues (not mirrors, not tank, not resin, etc.).

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