I’m having a repeated failure mode where a Silicone 40A print (on the Form 3) fails during the tray filling stage. I believe this is caused by the printer “timing out” of its filling stage due to the viscosity of the Silicone 40A resin and slow dispense time. I’ve been able to correct this failure by manually dumping resin into the tray, presumably helping the printer along to its desired fill level faster than it would naturally and before its timeout. I’ve included a few questions to help with troubleshooting and hopefully mitigate this failure in the future:
What is the filling timeout limit (so I know to check back to see if something actually started printing) and is it material-specific?
For my workaround (manually filling the tank), is there a harm in adding too much resin to the tank (e.g., print layers would not cure properly or it would throw off the Form 3’s internal tracking of resin usage)?
If there’s a risk to adding too much resin, what is a good target of resin to add (e.g., target for the approximate mL of the part you’re printing)?
Finally, is this issue also present on the Form 4?
I haven’t run into this issue since I typically manually fill the tank as you have been doing as well. On the Form3 I have found that filling to ~75 - 80% of the wiper height has never caused issues like overflowing or print defects. What you could do is look look at the resin height of a tank that the system has filled and then match that.
Again, haven’t ran into the issue on the Form4, however that system routinely throws “Tank is filling slowly” warnings which I ignore, and has never caused an issue. Due to the high viscosity of the Silicone40A resin relative to the others I suspect that the software isnt tuned well to the reduced flow rates.
@payerle You absolutely can fill the tank manually to get things going. Something to note, if you do that, the printer will think that there is more in the resin cartridge than there actually is, and you can run into what we call “tank dry out” because the printer ran out of resin.
Make sure you check the bite valve on the resin cartridge to ensure that the slit is open. Also, make sure that you give the resin cartridge a good shake before each print, especially if you aren’t starting another print immediately after the last one.
You can always open a support case, and we’d be happy to take a deeper look into what may be happening so the printer isn’t dispensing fast enough to avoid the time-out you are seeing.