I just pulled a couple prints from the printer and noticed some oddly cured blotches on the surface of one of them, and it was the side of the printer facing the window and the morning sun. Could the direct sunlightthrough the cover have cured the surface foam?
Which printer?
The cover blocks the range of light that cures the resin so it shouldn’t affect it, but I wouldn’t leave it in the sunlight anyway.
If there’s spots on the outside if you’re using a Form1/1+ then it may be dust in the printer, otherwise it may be some particles in the resin which needs the resin to be filtered.
Its a Form 2, sits on the opposite side of the room from the window, but must have been in direct sunlight this morning
Can you upload a few images of the issue you’re seeing? As @Zachary_Brackin mentioned, the cover does block out reactive wavelengths so it’s not likely that ambient light is causing issue.
these are two sides of the part, the blotches (lower pic) are on the side that were facing the window
How old is the resin tank?
Have you filtered/strained your tank for any “floaters”?
Post a picture of the supported model from PreForm. I’m not seeing a lot of support “pimples” and I’m wondering if how it’s supported might be contributing. Looking at the half-tube feature in the middle/left of the upper picture, it looks like it’s a bit “out of round” at the inner (right) end of the tube.
You’ve printed this part before? (bottom/rear floor pan for a car?)
Tank is very new, and that was the first print. No floaters or crap, I think it was 100% the surface foam that was cured by the direct sunlight on the box. I have reprinted it with a towel over the cover and it came out great.
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Can you open a ticket with our support team so that we can look into it and troubleshoot with you? We’ve done testing on the amount of reactive light transmission through the cover and found it to be near zero and far from sufficient to cure resin. We’ll want to verify that the issue has been corrected and make sure that everything is functioning as expected. Linking this thread in your ticket would be a big help.
I can do that if you want, that was the first time that happened, and the next print was fine. I don’t have any prints planned, but could could test something, will depend on the clouds tomorrow morning.
Does look like there were floaters, can see a void on the bottom of the part. Is the wiper parallel to the window? Thinking it isn’t the window but rather that the wiper pushed the floaters to one side and they collected on the part.
no, it was just on that face of the one part, and it was the front face, not side that the wiper would wash against. the lower pic is a second print, yeah, I’m wondering if that little nick is a spot on the window or where I removed a support from preform
Odd, I still don’t think it is from sunlight on one side but maybe you had some floaters that happened to cling to one side and they maybe caused some more.
I don’t know how far the sun’s light has moved on the wall in a week, but this is where it was this morning. I have a test strip of resin soaked paper towel sitting in my old cover in the sunlight, we’ll see what happens.
I think I might have figured something out, I put last night’s print into the ultrasonic cleaner with the Yellow Magic 7, and left them overnight. There was a lot of surface foam, like the previous part and since the cleaner has a clear top, the sunlight in the room might have done the deed, I think I got it early enough today to scrub them off before any damage was done. Now I know what to watch for - right culprit, wrong location.
THe sunlight will definitely cure any resin in the wash tanks, of which there will be plenty unless your cleaner is fresh out of the bottle… I use this exact method to “recycle” used IPA. Put the tanks out in the sun for a few hours, the resins comes out of suspension and settles on the bottom of the tank. You can filter it out with cheesecloth.
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You can leave the parts in YM but i would keep it covered, toss a cardboard box over the unit would do the trick.
Seems like you must have quite a bit of resin in the YM so I would toss that in the sun and reclaim it, filter out the globs. I just cured up the resin in my ultrasonic cleaner with YM in it. I have the same batch for about 9 months now and it can get pretty gunky if you don’t cure up what is in it.
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