The first resin tank that came with the printer worked fairly well for 6 months. And by “fairly well”, I mean about a 60% success rate. Prints just did not adhere to the build platform. They got stuck to the resin tray, like misshapen pancakes! After replacing the resin tray, it’s now at a 41% success rate! The last print (containing 10 individual parts) failed completely! Nothing printed! Now the tray has, what appears to be tears in the surface, after only 22 prints.
Is there something wrong with the laser, resin tray, or build platform? Should we be replacing the build platform more frequently? Is there something I can do to make the resin adhere better to the build platform?
Talking to Formlabs Support should be a good place to get your questions answered, if you’re not already trying that route. From my point of view, I’m curious about which resins you’re printing with, and what kind of models, how they’re oriented and supported.
You shouldn’t normally have to do anything to increase adhesion to the build platform, but if nothing else works and you’re out of options, there is a Z-axis adjustment setting, where moving the build platform slightly lower at the start of a print may help with adhesion in some cases, and you could also try using a fine-grained sandpaper to roughen the surface of your build platform somewhat.
Am talking with Support currently. I was just trying to see if this was a common issue, or if there might be something wrong with our printer, resin, or something else. So far we have only been using Grey v4 resin. As I mentioned in the first post, this has been a more prevalent problem after swapping out the resin tray, but it might be bad resin, or the result of a change in the firmware.
