I moved my Form 3 home recently, and have it in the garage. Last night while it was printing it looks like the garage got fairly cold. I was wondering if anyone knows what the acceptable temperature range is for reliable printing? Specifically, temperature reported by the Form 3. For example, right now it’s about 6c outside, and it looks like the printer is having a hard time maintaining 30c – without heating the garage I see printer temperature easily dropping to 25c.
My presumption is if the printer is too cold or too hot, there might be print issues that develop. Anyone have a sense for what those are, and what temperature range they occur at?
AIR from my college chem courses, reaction rates double with each 10 °C increase in temperature (or halve with each 10 °C drop) so I’d guess that you would see a substantial change in the UV-mediated resin polymerization rate at a 5 °C temperature drop. This is one of those questions that could use a definitive answer from Form Labs here on the forum.
Given that the Form 3 has the temperature sensor you’d imagine it would compensate for temperature variations, at least, within some “reasonable” threshold of 30c.
Curious to find out what that is.
Two nights ago I had a partial print failure. My guess is it was because of the temperature drop at night. I reprinted the part last night with a heater running in the garage, and it was fine.
The location that my printer is located in is pretty cold these days, but my machine hasn’t had any issues keeping the internal temperature to its 35C setpoint, even when the ambient temp is 15C or lower. I haven’t seen any temperature related failures at all and I’ve done some testing with and without a small heater in the space.