I’ve been using my form 2 about two months. 38 prints so far, 8 failures. It seems after about 500ml (about a print a day) of use my tanks consistently end up like this (5 of 9 tanks so far):
What could be causing this? I realize the tanks are consumables but IMO they should be lasting more than a week or so of printing.
In this particular tank I had 3 successful prints, then a failure. I cleaned up the resin and tried again with another failure. so I filtered the resin, inspected the tank and took the pic!
What could be causing this? I assume the PDMS layer is being damaged somehow. Note there is no cured resin attached to the bottom of the tank…the large ghost circle and small speckles are within the PDMS layer itself.
The points are all definitely from supports, the taller they are then the worse the effect is. The estimate of the life of a tray is a very rough estimate, depending on what you print it could be very different. If you print something that has a high height then it’s going to be printing on the same surface for many layers, if you print on 25 microns it likely has more of an effect than if you print with 50 microns.
Also, I’ve noticed that the cloudiness of the tank isn’t as high when you have the resin actually in there, once you clean out the resin then the cloudiness becomes much more apparent.
Is this ‘ghosting’ created in the first few mins when the platform is in the resin creating the base of the support structure? I did have a couple of circular pieces which were roughly that size and shape but they did not experience any failures.
I printed the item ( print#2.form (1.7 MB)) about 3 weeks ago twice with no problems. Then yesterday, 2 failures. Last night I swapped out for a new tank and this morning had a perfect part. /shrug
Each print was the same STL file oriented/supported the same way. Yesterday in between failures I positioned it differently on the platform, then it failed the second time. When swapping out tanks I simply hit reprint and success!
I have contacted support. They said the tank actually didn’t look that bad.
The ghosting is definitely due to the prints, it becomes more ghosted the more stuff you print. As for failures, make sure you stir the resin before you print, use the scraper and scrape the bottom of the tray and move the resin around.
Ya in between my failures yesterday I shook the cartridge, emptied the tank and ran the resin through a recommended paint strainer. I also inspected the glass underneath for resin spills, fingerprints, etc. Aside from a few dust particles there was nothing. This led me to believe it was an issue with the tank.
Regardless it seems to be OK now. Thanks for the input Zachary.
