Trouble with Clear resin on my Form 3

I am getting a lot of layer shifting/over curing and other small issues with clear, while grey is perfect. Anyone have any suggestions to get this curved dome to be more optically uniform? I added as many supports as possible as well…

I should mention it is Printed at 25 micron. Latest firmware ect.

Have a perusal of this thread if you haven’t already:

What you’re seeing resembles some of the photos there, with artifacts I’ve heard referred to as “layer shift”, “wobble” or “flow artifact”. Although in your case I’d say the most severe aberration looks like layer shift.

When the Form 3 first came out, such surface defects were seen in all the resins - especially for small prints with thin layer heights. Since then the situation has improved a great deal, one resin at a time, as Formlabs tunes the profiles. e.g. In Preform 3.5.1 (May 21) they “Improved print quality at 100, 50, and 25 microns” for Grey Resin, which I’m guessing is the tuning responsible for your better quality results in Grey.

I’ve kept an eye on release notes, and I haven’t noticed any “improved quality” statements yet for Clear at 25 microns (feel free to correct me if someone notices I’m wrong).

I did notice PreForm 3.8.1 (Sep 10) and later have a “Beta” profile mentioned for Clear 50 and 100 micron modes. This could be worth a shot if you can tolerate the thicker layer height. (The software also allows you to select 25 micron height using the Beta profile, although I’m not sure if that one is as “tuned”)

If the problem is simple layer shift, it might also improve by thickening the contact points or adding more supports.

Finally, if you want to get experimental, you could try “shielding” the parts like @donnie did:

Hope you are not like me and specifically bought the printer for 25 micron clear resin printer. Unfortunately 25 microns does not exist in the form 3 world for any resins AFAIK - Been that way since release.

My shields helped but not completely and once I added up the time cost and wasted resin costs for something that was still not smooth; I decided to mothball the printer.

You could try 50 micron as I recall that printing a bit better but I`d suggest rethinking printing this yourself and use a printing service. TBH I stopped using clear resin as I was wasting $$$ trying to get the details I wanted.

I`ll try clear again when Formlabs specifically say they have made improvements in the 25micron area.