Today we installed a new Flexible 80A cartridge and tank in our ~4mo old Form 3. We are running into a ton of issues getting the tank to fill; we are multiple hours in and the operation has aborted or timed out multiple times. We have:
Shaken the new cartridge
Inspected the bite valve and verified it is fine
Verified that the vent cap is open and slightly unscrewed
Rebooted the printer
Run the resin level calibration routine
I realize that the system drizzles in resin relatively slowly and periodically rechecks the tank level. I just don’t understand why this process takes so long on a new tank, and can’t seem to find a consensus on what is common or expected. Can anyone here shed some light on this? It’s extremely frustrating and kills our workflow; we are 5 hours into getting a new tank set up for a print job that is only supposed to take a few hours total…
EDIT: we are running firmware version rc-1.13.3-679
While flexible and elastic resins can take a while to fill it’s far from 5 hours.
If the tank is a new one just drop a bit of resin directly from the cartridge onto it. Can’t recall exactly how much but you can do it in stages and check every time. While a bother at least it will let you go through that print.
Well, my last bottle of Durable didn’t flow at all. The bite valve appeared to be fine. I considered giving the cartridge a squeeze, but figured I’d end up squirting resin all over my workshop. Instead, I took a #11 Xacto knife blade and ran it into the slit in the valve (slit-wise orientation). Poked it in about 1/2 the length of the blade. Bite valve started to work as expected, including (much to my relief) still able to maintain a drip-free closed state…
Yeah, sometimes resin gets harder (kind of cured) on the bite valve and one needs to poke around. It’s an issue even with unused cartridges for some reason.
I had a few like that in different materials, no idea why.
I can see that you’ve already tried a lot of the steps we normally recommend to resolve this issue. As such, I’d recommend manually filling your resin tank to get the process started. Simply pour resin into the tank until it is slightly below the lower fill line (as shown in the image below). The automatic filling process will take care of the rest!
Please note that we don’t normally recommend manual filling until you have tried the steps you listed above. Similarly, we’ve found that putting sharp objects inside the rubber valve can cause issues with the valve’s closing, so please use caution if you attempt this method.
Lastly, the issue may be with your printer’s cartridge dispense arm or firmware. To resolve this issue as efficiently as possible, I’d recommend getting in touch with our support team. They’ll be more than happy to investigate your situation more closely so we can figure out what might be going on!
Thanks @Jackson, I am in touch with support so should get some answers eventually. I don’t recognize that tank; is it a new version? Is there a fill line somewhere on the V2.1 tank?
My apologies, that’s actually a Form 2 tank! There are no fill lines on either version of the Form 3 resin tank. As a substitute, we recommend filling until the resin is about halfway up the mixer arm. Sorry for the confusion!
