I haven’t even had a failure like this so I thought I would find out the cause before I printed again.
I’ve printed this bracelet before and it was fine. The print I did yesterday was ok except one side wasn’t complete. Cleaned the tank, found all sorts of pieces there, changed a few things annd began again this morning. This third time is really weird. I aborted the print about halfway through. My resin is low, but there’s still a bunch in the tank. I’m just mentioning that in case it’s a factor. Here are pictures.
THe glass is still clean. The partial print I included had been done the night before and I cleaned up afterwards. And I moved the messed up print to a different part of the platform.
I’ve only had the one container of resin with this tank. I’d heard tanks were good for 2 resin containers. I did notice that the wiper streaks as it goes across, but I can’t make that fit logically. It’s just moving the resin around.
When you say you cleaned up the partial print the night before, that doesn’t necessarily follow that you know the glass is clean. To know the glass is clean, you have to remove the tank from the printer. You don’t necessarily have to do that to clean up from a blown print. If you did that, do it again and this time shine a light in to the window and see if you can see anything on the mirror. Also inspect the bottom of the tank.
When you cleaned up, what did you do with the resin in the tank? Each time a print fails, it contaminates the resin with lots of loose flakes and chunks that will screw up subsequent prints if not removed. I have a really fine-mesh stainless screen strainer I stole from my wife’s kitchen equipment. Resin gets through it, albeit slow as molasses, and I filter suspect resin with this when necessary.
The failure kind of looks like what you might get from a worn out tank (though honestly, it looks kind of unusual, too. Supports seem to show the negative effects sometimes even more so than the body of the print, but the supports I can see on your print look pretty good while the print is just total trash). Troubleshooting 101 for this kind of issue is “new tank new resin”. So if you’ve got the supplies to try it, that’s probably going to be your first step anyway, you might as well give it a shot.
It might be possible that part of the file is unsupported which is creating flakes in the tank and disrupting the rest of the print. There could also be something obscuring your optics. In any case, I’ve gotten in touch with our support team and one of our members will be reaching out over email to help you troubleshoot.
I’m doing a test print this evening using the black. CLeaned the tank, took it off and checked it for the ghosting stuff on the plastic bottom. It looks ok. I’m almost out of this black and I was hoping to get this last print done before I ordered, but I this your test print is going to take it all.
What exacting are you looking for with the test? Could I have done it with another tank and resin and still gotten results that were useful? It seemed not to me, which is why I bit the bullet and cleaned the tank. It was really full of lots and resin pieces.
Yeah, I’d err away from the issue being unsupported geometry, but it is possible that prior prints had failed slightly and didn’t disrupt the rest of the print. More likely, there’s something obscuring the optics.
We know that the test print will reliably complete on machines that are functioning correctly. Our support team can diagnose quite a number of issues based on how your test print comes out. It’s very important that you use a clean tank to run the test print. Particulate in the tank will disrupt prints and filtering resin should be a first troubleshooting step to rule out rogue resin interfering with parts.
In my experience, cleanliness is most likely the issue. I could’ve swore I had cleaned the tank thoroughly, but found that the wiper had built up a large amount of loose material from a failed print. There’s a comb you can download off of thingiverse to strain it a bit more. Clear was hard to clean. With black, without a strainer I wouldn’t trust it. Misery loves company, and so do failed prints!
Clean your tank/resin! (There isn’t a clean way to to this, wear gloves and be careful with the window)
I got away with just using the comb for getting most of the crap floating around. I may need to again here soon…
Remove the resin tray from the printer, make sure everything inside the cover area is cleaned up, and put the printer in a sunny window for a few minutes. It’ll cure any resin on the outside of the printer and get rid of the stickiness. If you use IPA on the acrylic cover it may fog and/or craze/crack.
Also, sorry for my misogynistic assumption that you were a “he”.
