For the last six years I have successfully build my career as an artist, solely on sculptures coming out of the 650. These go for several thousands of Euro’s, so the surface quality has to be impeccable.
Lately, almost 3 out of 4 of my larger pieces come out of the 650 with a very bad surface. This is almost always a section of the piece (in height 3-10 cm) and always facing the front of the machine. In that section, the layers delaminate or are to thin, in any case you see gaps between the layers. These break off during post processing, causing a very ugly end result. See attached an example and a picture which explains the position of the section.
Last week I have conducted a test in which I have filmed the printing of a 15cm figure, standing upright in the printer. The printing took around six hours. In the upright figure I printed, there is a clear line above which layers are delaminating. I have counted the layers up to that point and came to around 700 layers. Exactly at that moment, the printer paused for about ten minutes and it sounded like it was clearing the overflows or fluidizing the feeder. Apparently after that moment, there is to much air in the powder, or the powder isn’t compact enough anymore.
Is there a way to adjust settings so it becomes less likely that this happens? I surely hope so, because my life depends on it. The Dutch distributor says they can not help me. I have also asked for a solution to my problems at 3DSystems themselves, but they have not answered yet.
A bit off-topic, but your sandblasting cjp models intrigued me. I assume you are blasting green models? Don’t they get damaged? What kind of blaster - abrasive are you using?
I can second you on the cleaning and maintenance - most problems are either bad maintenance or faulty cables (shame on zcorp/3ds for that pogo cable solution)
