Restoration of a "cheap" Form 2 printer from eBay

[E60M5]

I recently bought a Form 2 printer off eBay. It seemed like a reasonable gamble for $250 (+$100 shipping) for something that likely only needed the optics to be cleaned thoroughly and maybe the resin dispenser. What arrived was NOT what I expected. It seems the seller decided to ship the printer across the country with resin still inside it!

I have so far made it through a few days of cleaning. I’ll update this thread showing my progress.

[Randy_Cohen]

OMG.

[E60M5]

As I mentioned, the printer arrived with resin everywhere - especially all over the outside.

It was all pretty disgusting and I had to be particularly careful not to get the resin on my skin. Fortunately I bought a stainless steel table for the printer so it was easy to clean. I expected to get little drips here and there, but over the first week or so resin just kept leaking out the bottom of the printer. Anyway, the orange cover was unbolted and cleaned in the sink with soap and water and the outside of the printer was wiped down good with alcohol and a liberal amount of paper towels.

That was good enough for day 1. It would be a good week before my next cleaning day, so I covered it all with a large garbage bag. This is in my basement and you can see I have a small window above, so I’ll need to get that covered at some point.

I’m not sure if you can see in this last picture, but that dental resin cartridge has the breather open (it was “locked” open with cured resin) and is still about half full. I did take apart the cap and pulled out the cured resin so I could close it.

[agiorgitis]

i assume the seller didn’t own that printer. Who ships a printer with the resin inside???

[bolsoncerrado]

He probably bought it like that and passed the crap to someone else… Lameful. What a society. Oh god…

[agiorgitis]

worst case if it doesn’t work is to sell it for parts and get a small profit too

[E60M5]

I did reach out the the seller and he simply apologized and said that it “has been sitting like that for a long time”. It is what it is. It just means that instead of being a great deal, it means that I get to learn exactly how these machines are put together. Hopefully when everything is cleaned up I’ll remember how it goes back together!

[E60M5]

To continue my story, it took about a week before I had free time to start taking this apart. I cleaned off the island in the kitchen and started breaking it down to clean. As expected, the resin seems to have gone everywhere.

It was very easy to remove the main shell. Just a couple bolts and it came off. What I’ve found is that the resin just gets sucked into any place where two pieces are close together. So EVERYTHING must come apart to clean it properly.

For example, here is the bottom plate from the power supply. I did take it completely apart and there was a little bit of resin to clean out of it, but for the most part the power supply itself was ok.

The main logic board was not as lucky.

Now I could finally get a look at the optics area. There is definitely resin around it and even some inside, but the actual mirrors look untouched. The mirrors and glass were (and still are) VERY cloudy. I’ll tackle those last before I start putting things back together. I did manage to buy a new top glass off eBay just in case.

Once I got a good look at the base it actually didn’t seem to be as bad as I was expecting. That’s when I made things much worse! I poured alcohol into the cavities with the resin and tried washing it out with the hose.

If I had to do this over again, I would have likely soaked up as much as I could with QTips and then used a UV flashlight to cure what was left and then simply pulled it out cleanly. Ultimately this step backwards broke me for the day and I packed everything up for the next cleaning day.

Here is as far as I got before packing up. All major components disassembled. The frame is now very clean. And I have an idea of what I’m up against. I stressed over how to remove the tower, but that will wait until later.

For those of you wondering why the pliers are there, the feet were not screwed in during shipping and every single one was bent. I had to use pliers to get a couple out that refused to turn. This was an easy fix - I bought some new ones on Amazon that seem to work great (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07L6B64FY).

Edit: Somehow I missed this picture… When I started bringing everything back to the basement I noticed the mess that was left behind earlier in the day. Even though I had originally cleaned the outside as best I could after unpacking, this resin still oozed out after sitting for a week. I’m definitely glad I have the stainless table for this thing!

[E60M5]

There is more I forgot to include from this cleaning day. After putting everything away I tried cleaning the resin off the circuit boards. I used Q-Tips and 99% alcohol, but I think all I managed to do was move the resin around some. I’ll try again with a toothbrush and see if I have any better luck. If nothing else, maybe this is a reason to get an ultrasonic cleaner .

I did have several anti-static bags lying around to store these in while I wait for time to try again. And of course everything is protected from UV too.

[Randy_Cohen]

You can soak the PCBAs in IPA. Really, any amount of time should be OK. Shouldn’t be anything on the board that IPA will hurt. But you want to use 99% and you should dry them out with some heat (the boards hit ~450F during the reflow solder operation, so an oven set to 150F won’t hurt anything either) to make sure no water gets left behind under any components when you’re done. And if you have to use actual water, you want to use distilled/deionized water, not tap water. Tap water will leave behind corrosives (it gets trapped
under the components) like Chlorine that’ll attack components and copper.

Quite honestly, I don’t think a coating of cured resin is going to hurt anything. A quick solution would be to focus on cleaning the connectors and then just let the boards sit in the sun for a day (flipping, and then another day).

If anything, the resin will act as a “conformal coating” and offer some mechanical protection to the coated parts (they don’t need it, but they don’t “know” that ).

The place you might have the biggest problem is the galvo block. If resin got in to the bearings, you’re probably “toast”. You can wash them out with IPA but that’ll remove any lubricant in the bearings as well, and relubricating them might be pretty hard to do (I’m not sure but I’m guessing the bearings have some kind of labyrinth seal to keep the oil in and the environment out). So before you put too much additional effort in to it, I’d check the galvos. They should move with the slightest of nudges. It sounds like you’re going to have to clean those mirrors anyway, so you could remove the block, inspect them, and then go ahead and clean the glass if it doesn’t look like resin got to any of the rotating components.