I’m incredibly new to 3D printing. I have an Anycubic Photon Mono 2 and I’m using the Anycubic standard resin. My first couple of prints went fine; first one was the test print and the second was a set of dice (which technically didn’t go fine since I wasn’t aware you can’t just print right on the plate, so one side was blank).
However, ever since then my next 4 prints have failed. I thought I was maybe going too complex right off the bat - attempting to print a flexible dragon for my kids - so I decided to run the resin exposure test (“RERF”). Only 4 of the 8 printed, and the ones that did only barely printed. I have absolutely no idea what’s going on with this and was hoping that someone here could give some insight and advice.
Thanks!
@KiloGex you need to tune your printer for the cold. Exposure times need to be longer and rise times slower. The set reaction is slower and the resin more viscous.
I managed with my printer in similar temps. Clean up is also more difficult in lower temps. I don’t have the link I used, others may suggest.Is it cold where your printer is?
Somewhat. It’s in my basement and it usually hovers around 50* in there until the summer (which it is not).
I’m assuming you don’t mean 50C. This is your problem. You need to buy or build a heating solution for your printer. There are many commercial products available. You need a temperature 75F or higher for resins before you print. Some print best at 80F+.
Once you get the temperature taken care of 6 seconds will likely be too high of an exposure time for a monochrome LCD printer.
Exactly. I was printing fine, then winter came, and everything started to fail. Got a cheap fermentation Heating Belt wrapped around my vat and everything was working great again Then I wasn’t being diligent about cleaning my plate and started getting fails until I realized the issue.
Great! Thank you so much for the help. I’ll start researching!
The cheapest and easiest trend to be the Brewers bands. People wrap them around their resin vats.
I built the one in the second video but there weren’t as many out of the box solutions back then.
Im presently doing all my printing via craftcloud. It seems too expensive and fiddly to do it myself. But I’ve got this room where, if I get a printer, I’ll put it.
So if I do it like a humidor. Controlled environment and ventilation. Is this the normal thing to do?
You haven’t given us any settings to evaluate. The test you are using seems overkill.
https://www.tableflipfoundry.com/3d-printing/the-cones-of-calibration-v3/
Apologies. I’m not entirely sure where to get the settings from. There are no real settings on the machine (outside of exposure, which is set at 6 seconds). The file also isn’t readable with the slicer, so I’m not sure if there’s additional settings in the file itself.
I’ll try out the file you suggested! Thank you.
exposure, which is set at 6 seconds
Woah, don’t know if this could be causing your problem, but this seems really high. I used to used a Mono X, highest exposure time would be in the 3s range. Are you maybe printing at reduced brightness?
Nope. That was the standard exposure setting. I’ll try adjusting that and maybe it helps though.
Double check the settings in your printer and slicer that “screen brightness”, “screen power”, “max power” or something to that effect is set to 100%. I’ve seen some default to 70%-80%, the theoretical reason being that reducing power to the screen can lengthen its lifespan… however, afaik these claims have not been backed up by data, and the logical counterargument is that any lifespan gains will be offset by the increased length of time the screen is on. Even if you can squeeze a few extra prints out of the screen before it dies, you’re making all your prints take way longer than necessary.
For reference, this is the recommended printing settings chart provided by anycubic for their standard gray resin; the recommended exposure time for your printer at default layer height is 2.5 seconds. If you’re using 100% power, you’re more than doubling the normalexposure.
Thanks! That’s super helpful.
