Trouble with Clear resin on my Form 3

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: