I’ve been tasked with bringing our Form 3BL out of storage after a couple years. The plan is to use it to manufacture pharmaceutical product assembly fixtures that will be used in automation, in a clean room environment. I plan to use BioMed White for this, and I’ve placed an order for a few liters and a resin tank. But meanwhile…
We have a few liters of Tough 2000, still in the box unopened, and a brand new resin tank. So, I figured I would try a print. I’m aware that there is a shelf life of these resins, and that they are probably expired, and that’s kind of my question. My print failed silently. As soon as there was a substantial amount of surface area to peel, the part separated from its supports and became a slug of material fused to the membrane. It peeled away by hand so nothing lost except time and some resin.
My question is, how likely is this due to expired resin? I tried to shake it, but shaking resin is like shaking toothpaste. I’m not saying the resin is thick like toothpaste, but that it doesn’t easily agitate by hand shaking. So, I suspect solids were settled out to some degree.
Should I be discouraged, or is it reasonable to expect two year old resin to be problematic?
I’ve been using Tough 2000 V2 (you’re likely using V1). I found that it was quite viscous until it warmed up. This likely could be the same problem for you when you tried to shake it.
I’ve had that happen before with new resin, so you’re not the only one. Most of the time if you print it on a raft it seems to do okay, but I’m not sure how that might work with your older resin.
If you can, try printing it with supports V2. There are more supports, and they have smaller touchpoints, but they seem to be good otherwise.
Likely the resin isn’t good anymore (especially considering it’s Tough resin). I’d say try making some parts on the build platform itself (like some sort of calibration cube or something) and see if you can get it to work. At this point, there’s not really any harm in trying if it will just be thrown away otherwise.
It’s 2+ years old. I was able to print the same model successfully in brand new BioMed White once it arrived. For now I will blame it on the material. I’ll revisit it when I have a little more print history.
