I’m sure this has been discussed at length, and sorry in advance, I’m new to the party… but it seems to me that plate retraction for each and every layer takes a LOT of time.
I was watching a video on a kickstarter 3D printer that appears to accomplish the same thing by rocking the tray. If this approach patented? It seems to me that rocking vs full extraction would speed up the print by a significant amount.
There’s quite a lot to the peel besides just getting the print unstuck from the bottom of the tank. What works best probably depends on a lot of factors including the machine geometry and resin and laser power and resin-tank bottom material.
FL unquestionably understands the benefit of faster print time, so I gotta assume they settled on what the printer does for good reasons. Though I do have to admit it seems to move the tank during the peel a lot further than necessary.
The Form1 did almost a rocking motion–where it tilts the tray, but they changed to the sliding motion for the Form2 because it puts less stress on the print and allows you to print larger objects more successfully.
Interesting! Thank you for letting me know. I trust FL has the best approach. I was watching a print last night, trying to time how much a rocking motion might save… it’s nowhere close to 25%… perhaps 10%, and I would not want to save that time at the expense of print quality.
The question I’ve been meaning to ask FL is why the heck the F2 peel has to move the tray so far. You’d think after the first 10mm there wouldn’t be a need to go any further. I’m sure there’s a good reason for dragging the print all that way before lifting it up, I just can’t figure out what that could be!
It lifts up while it’s sliding the tray
I’m guessing they haven’t been too concerned with how far they move the tray and that they could reduce it with testing
For what it’s worth, the peeling behavior is not 100% consistent. I’ve observed different sliding vs. lifting behavior at different layers in the model.
In particular, when I built a large bolt-shaped model the tray slides sideways before lifting while building the main shaft of the bolt. But when it reaches the overhanging head of the bolt the printer immediately lifts the model straight up before any sideways motion. (The overhang is supported with scaffolds, btw.)