Hi All,
a have a bit of experince on my Form 3B with Grey and Elastic 50A resin but i’ve just bought the Tough 1500 and after 4/5 prints, still i don’t understand why is so tricky.
After all these prints, i often find little pieces of the resin cured, on the mixer, in the resin tank and some flake off from the piece.
So, premising that this is not like my Elegoo Mars 2 Pro, where you have to choose the right exposing setting to have a good print, where i’m doing wrong? I can’t choose the printing settings, i can only choose how to orientate the particular and where the supports should stay…
It’s so common to have cured pieces floating in the tank for this kind of resin?
Does someone had or has the same problem? And if they managed, how you solved it?
Those pieces are likely from a previous failure where a part was printed directly on the platform and didn’t adhere and was left in the tank, then the wiper came and pulled it off and it’s been floating around in the resin since then.
Filter your resin, all of it and make sure to look in any holes in the wiper arm, use a tweezers to get the small flakes out.
And yeah, Tough 1500 seams trickier to print with, it’s also not as precise as standard resins. When printing on the platform you’ll get a larger elephants foot and at least in older firmware versions you couldn’t switch between layer heights without the parts external dimensions slightly changing.
Looking at this, this does, as Reine noted, look like there’s debris from other prints in the tank. I’d go through the Cleaning after a Failed Print process to be sure there’s no solids to adhere to the part.
Beyond that, if you have a print failure, I’d reach out to Support with pictures and the .form file and we’ll be able to assist further.
I’m sure there was no debris because i hadjust filtered the tank, removing the old debris produced by the erlier failed print and that, was a new resin tank where i put the resin after being filtered again. I will contact the support to ask for further informations.
I’m sorry to hear that you’ve encountered similar failures recently. The shelf life for Tough 1500 is 24 months, so the resin should not be expired. The dates printed on the cartridge are usually manufacture and expiration dates, but I’m not sure why these are so close together. I will ask about this and get back to you with any updates. As for the debris in the tank, it’s possible for the cured resin pieces to come from the print you were just trying to run. Since Tough 1500 mixes during the print, the mixer can pick up cured resin debris that didn’t adhere to the rest of the print layer by layer, which causes this kind of accumulation.
To follow up on this, it sounds like the Tough 1500 estimated lifetime was initially much shorter, as shown on your cartridge. After we performed more testing, we extended the lifetime estimate to 24 months. Because of that, the resin should still be within its recommended lifetime.
Thank you for looking that up. I fully cleaned the tank this morning and printed again, this time it worked, even though I for once managed to miss a flake that got stuck in one of the printed models.
It’s too bad these, what I feel like random fails happen. It takes so much time and effort to clean and you also loose valuable resin in the process.
Just this time it costed me over three times the amount of resin to get my stuff printed.
I know it looks like previous print debris. But I think it’s something else.
On my rounds with tough1500, I found out that I needed to adjust the z-height. What’s funny is that not long ago, I purchased those new modular platforms (the bendy kind) which everyone is raving about… however, I had to redo the z-height one more time.
What I’m getting at, is… I think it’s possible that you’re getting pull-off from a z-height that may need adjustment. I think you’re getting a partial cure, that doesn’t bond with the first layers on the stage, but bonds later on and pulls that dingle-berry debris with it. After I made my z-height adjustments, they stopped forming. I got much better prints.
I know this is an old thread, just commenting for future readers. The same thing happened to me with a cartridge of Tought 1500 that was past its expiration date. I was getting the same type of intermediate layer adhesion failures that were leaving little rings all over the tank and the parts with every print. I filtered the tank after each failure, and after a few failures, I went so far as to filter the resin out of the cartridge (I wasn’t sure of the root cause of the problem at the time). Eventually, I read enough about problems like this that I checked the expiration date and found my cartridge was a year past its shelf life. I replaced the expired cartridge with a new cartridge, thoroughly cleaning the tank with IPA to remove all traces of the old resin before filling the tank from the new cartridge. I haven’t had a single failure with the new resin, and I’ve printed at least a dozen jobs now. Even the same jobs that were failing before print fine now with the new resin.
