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I’ve just brought my printer back out after a month and it’s first print created a solid block of resin about 1.5 cm deep and the full width and length of the print bed. What could cause this?

My only thought so far is that the FEP film / vat bed is looking a little cloudy even after cleaning. I wondered if this could have caused the light to diffuse across the whole bed?

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  • $\begingroup$ Welcome to 3D Printing.SE! $\endgroup$
    – 0scar ♦
    Dec 21, 2019 at 11:43

2 Answers 2

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Is the laser (or whatever light source it uses) visible? The cloudy film sounds like a good candidate for light diffusion and thus solidifying the entire resin, but if there are visible components to the light source it may help narrow it down.

If it uses a projector ("LCD") solutions, it may also be that the display that filters the light to certain regions of the resin to selectively solidify the print may be at fault, but that's rather unlikely.

The first thing that, in my opinion, you should do is to check that the object you are printing does not have a corrupt model file. Assuming that you have spare, fresh resin (if your resin is old, that's actually the most likely issue...) and it wasn't too hard to pry out that block, you could try printing something else that worked in the past.

While it's doing that, you may be able to see where/how it is printing. If the beam diffuses or lights up the whole area, you can tell if it's a printer issue (the film sounds like a good first thing to try replacing in that case). On the other hand, if the resin is old, it's probably just getting oversensitive and your printer is fine.

The resin is very touchy with these things, and has a shelf life of a few weeks to a few months, and less if it's ever opened.

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    $\begingroup$ Thanks. The resin was old and the last bit in the bottom of a bottle. New resin arrives on the 2nd Jan and I’ll see how that does. Will mark the answer or leave a comment once I’ve had chance to check it out $\endgroup$
    – TomDunning
    Dec 31, 2019 at 0:10
  • $\begingroup$ Ooh yeah, that would do it. It also disagrees with air, so the bottle being nearly empty would not help matters... $\endgroup$
    – RDragonrydr
    Jan 2, 2020 at 2:04
  • $\begingroup$ It looks like it might be the resin. I replaced it with Elegoo resin but now it's just printing the bed and giving up. The sparkmaker doesn't give me any indication as to why it stopped. Any ideas @RDragonrydr $\endgroup$
    – TomDunning
    Jan 3, 2020 at 1:44
  • $\begingroup$ I'm not clear what you mean by "just printing the bed"? $\endgroup$
    – RDragonrydr
    Jan 4, 2020 at 5:50
  • $\begingroup$ The platform. It was just printing a few laters. $\endgroup$
    – TomDunning
    Jan 4, 2020 at 16:35
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I had an issue with mine. I had a tiny hole that dripped some resin on the LCD screen. I scrapped it off as best I could but there were some serious printing problems on that side. I got a new LCD screen and replaced that and now print jobs that use to work are not printing solid blocks. I have no luck trying to repair it, so I sent support a question on how to fix it and what is causing it. I will update when I know more

Update: LCD screen was replaced upside down making the ribbon cable go in backwards. I swapped/flipped it over and it works fine now. So if you are having a solid block issue. Replace the lcd but also be cautious of what side goes up. They don’t show you in the videos.

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    $\begingroup$ Did your problems also result in a block resin being printed? If not, then this is not really an answer. Please add this to your answer. $\endgroup$
    – 0scar ♦
    Jan 20, 2020 at 14:36
  • $\begingroup$ Check your LCD ribbon cable. I replaced my LCD screen and the cable was in backwards. Or the lcd was upside down. That was my issue. $\endgroup$
    – Bruce Wayne
    Jan 21, 2020 at 16:20

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