To start I have sent in a support ticket. I just wanted to make sure there was some kind of register that others would know of the failures happening.
Last night I got a message stating the resin was low. Shortly after the first message I got one saying motor jam. I called our night watch guy and instructed him on replacing the resin cartridge. I also had him look over the machine carefully to see if there were any obstructions. He saw none so we continued the print., this printer had given a false motor jam warning before so I thought little of it. Shortly after restarting we got another message and I told him to leave it for the morning.
I come into work this morning to see disaster. There is resin dripping outside the machine, There is a gobbled up mess in the tray, and my cover is now cracked in several places.
The mess is most likely my fault for telling him to ignore the warning, he said he didn’t see anything that would stop the platform from moving but I did not tell him to look in the tank. What really surprises me about this is the amount and depth of the crevices FromLabs left for the resin to leak into. In the next model they should look to put a gutter system and collection tray. Fortunately there seems to be none in the laser tray.
Now what i do want an explanation to is why did my cover crack. I saw someone else in the forum had a similar problem with a similar print failure and his cover cracked too. Below you will find a link to google drive with some photos documenting the damage.
Yikes, here’s to hoping our support team is able to get you back up and running quickly. Our goal is of course to avoid spills all together but I can see the utility in expanding the gutter system to catch more severe overflows.
There are 2 things that might have contributed to the cover cracking. There are components of some resins that will weaken the acrylic used with the cover. Oftentimes when we see cracked covers, it’s after a fair bit of exposure to resin or IPA.
If your motors were jamming, that could have caused vibrations or more severe knocking in the machine. This compounded with exposure to resin might have lead to the crack.
Thanks for your input Frew, I was contacted by Dan in support and he seemed to be right on top of helping out. He sent instructions on how to disassemble and inspect the printer and after getting the outter shell off I did notice that those crevices were in fact a gutter system. Though I will say a very weak one at that. It might be a good idea to design one that actually contacts the shell and have a drawer of sorts that one could pull out from the front or side with the excess resin. The vacuum formed tray seemed inadequate and of low quality. I was lucky that only a small amount leaked past the gutter and into the bottom of the machine. No laser cabinet penetration and only 1 honeycomb had any resin in it. I do want to say thanks to Dan for his help in this matter and remind the users to contact support prior to taking their machine apart.
Dan did also mention the likelihood of the resin creating those cracks after long exposure, it was roughly 14 hours before I was able to attend to the matter so that does make a lot of sense. He thought my print might have been faulty but I mentioned to him that I had printed it almost 20 times prior in 3 different types of your resin and this was the last one in a series of 6 that I was printing this week. So I changed out my resin tray for a new one after I cleaned everything very well and it is now attempting the print once more.