Help please! (from anyone running a ZCorp Z310)

Sake. :mrgreen:

Don’t drink the Zapagap!

[ Deleted ]

Hi Scott,

I picked up a Zcorp not too long ago too. And to my disappointment refilling the powder and binder costs more than I paid for the machine itself! The monopoly/corporate greed with this technology is outrageous. I understand it took a lot of development dollars but a 60 something fold markup on materials is extortion in my opinion! I would be happy to pay anything less than double of the base ingredients cost for something blended that I know that works. I would think the original purchase price of the printer alone would create a sufficient profit margin.

I tried the sake and hydroperm as well. I started with a new printhead and it worked for a short while, I think only because there was ink in the new printhead. Once that ran through I got the same results as you -the printhead kept going to the cleaning station, striping in the print, and overheating errors. I think maybe the sake recipe works ok for different print heads in the other printers but not the HP10 printhead?

After feeling like a failure I mixed some distilled water, isopropyl alcohol (90%) and inkjet cleaner solution (from ebay). I poured it in by eye about 60 parts water 20 parts cleaner and 20 parts alcohol and it seemed to work ok (in hindsight I should have measured the amounts). I have no idea if the cleaner is designed to run through these printheads. I only have a few prints on it but it has yet to break anything… I since have had success printing with hydroperm. The downside is it takes a long long time to dry to get strong enough to handle. To solve this I made a custom build plate that can go into an oven -sturdy aluminum plate with sandpaper glued on the top. After printing I raised the build platform all the way to the top cleaning up powder on the sides of the part so it does not fall of when transporting to the oven but being careful not to disturb the part. I then bake in a toaster oven I bought in the name of science just for this. One hour at 300 F did the trick for the three parts I have tried. Going to do some aluminum pours in the hydroperm molds hopefully this week.

I have yet to find a supplier for hydroperm locally. While I was waiting for it to be shopped I tried some homebrew concoctions (tring to copy hydroperm from the msds) consisting of: plaster (Sheetrock Easy Sand Joint Compound), portland cement, and foot powder. I tried mixing in #80 sand as well. I cant say any of the tests worked any better than hydroperm.

As for the ink solution make sure and check out this link Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos

I can’t figure out where to get SURFYNOL (R) 465. Airproducts won’t ship to a non-industrial zoned shipping address.

The reason I bought the printer is to print molds for direct pour casting Aluminum. Apparently ZCorp used to sell ZCast that was formulated for this but they no longer sell a substitute as far as I can tell. I called 3D Systems and they had no idea what I was talking about - they only could recommend products for lost wax casting (I’m not interested in that). I sent them an email and they have yet to respond… I should have done more research before I bought the printer I guess. I assumed they still sold it and since it is made out of sand it would be cheap.

I think I found a substitute for the SURFANOL 465. I found a product with the same CAS Number (9014-85-1) over at http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/.

I just ordered it and powdered potassium sulfate.

http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/search?term=461199-100ML&interface=All&N=0&mode=match%20partialmax&lang=en&region=US&focus=product

http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/search?term=P0772-250G&interface=All&N=0&mode=match%20partialmax&lang=en&region=US&focus=product

I also ordered some Glycerol by RPI that I found on amazon. Hopefully the recipe works.

I have yet to find a place to get Proxel GXL. I’ll just leave it out for now and see how it works.

Good data. I’m planning to run some sawdust tests this week. I bought a gallon of EBay binder (still absurdly priced), but I don’t want to be debugging two things at once.

Let us know how it turns out. I got the shipment and made a gallon of the binder using the recipe I referenced omitting the Proxel GXL. Note that there is a typo I think its 7.5 g not 7.5 mg of Potassium Sulfate. I have two prints with it and one more printing now. So far so good.

Has anyone tried Ultracal 30? I think I’m going to give it a try. The mixing directions call for much less water than Hydroperm which I think may be a benefit for printing? I’m guessing it would be stronger too.

Sawdust test worked well, until I started getting error 1002. Any ideas on that? Ordered a new printhead since I have no spares.

Green:

Infusing with resin:

I used to run a Z Corp machine. I hated it. Expensive and the parts were so fragile. Good for white models though. The texture actually simulates a heavy sand mold texture which is nice. Unfortunately that is 1% of what I need to prototype.

Nice to see some people trying to breath new life into these though. It was cool technology. Butt simple. It makes you bang your head and say, “why didn’t we have 3D printers in 1976!”.

I remember having the same error while running all of their proprietary materials. If I remember correctly, it was either the rails were too dusty or the head station was not clean enough. You have to practically hand polish the inside of this thing after every print.

Probably a printhead. I just got the same error. Does anyone have any experience with how long the heads are supposed to last in terms of printed volume? I’m hoping it was the mystery print head cleaner and alcohol solution I had previously ran through it and not the new solution recipe. Replacing the print head did the trick for me. I noticed you can sometimes get color HP10 print heads a lot cheaper off of places like ebay. I wonder if you can just replace the chip with one from a used black cartridge? I ordered a set for cheap, hoping it works. Does anyone know if there are any aftermarket re-settable chips for this print head?

There is a doc called “ZPrinter®310 Troubleshooting Guide” that explains the error codes. Google that and you can find a download of the pdf.

What is the recipe for the sawdust? And why that material?

I just bought some Ultracal 30 yesterday. I’ll be giving it a try maybe this weekend. Hydroperm is working ok except for taking forever to cure when printed but I can’t find a place locally that stocks it and shipping costs more than the product itself.

The book suggests that error code is either the pogo card or ribbon cable. I have a new print head on the way, I’ll try that first, then a ribbon cable (only $140! :angry: ).

The material is sawdust and a couple water-activated binders (still playing with the mix). I actually went to the grocery store and grabbed a bunch of stuff that seemed like it would solidify with water. Tapioca, soy flour, sugar, wheat gluten, etc. Powdered UF glue would probably work great, but I don’t want the formaldehyde.

I’m planning to use this for producing home goods (tabletop accessories, maybe furniture components), hence the material experimentation. It’s also a good story, using a waste product, etc. Looks promising so far, the parts are nice and spongy in their green state and soak up the resin readily. Pretty good surface finish, and quite strong after curing.

I was thinking of trying UF glue also but the formaldehyde scared me away too. I tried Ultracal30 and so far I can’t really tell the difference from Hydroperm.

Despite what the troubleshooting guide says, looks like my error was indeed a print head. What are the plans for when they go obsolete? Seems like the reliability of the old stock is pretty poor already.

3D Systems still sells the heads. But when they quit and all the old stock runs out from places like fleebay I assume its the end of the line for the printer. If and when that day comes and I still have a use for the printer I might just hack the frame with another print head and throw an arduino in it to control it. It looks like there is some progress on open source software http://pwdr.github.io/ Plan B, an Open Source 3DP (powder and Inkjet) 3D Printer : 12 Steps (with Pictures) - Instructables

I have been printing more molds with Ultracal30. Seems to be doing ok although brittle and not so strong and not a very clean perimeters. After realizing that plaster chemically sets using water instead of drying I quit putting my parts in the oven. I think it was doing more harm than good.

The magic ingredient the purpose sold 3D powder has seems to be PVA as far as I can tell but I have heard conflicting information if this is polyvinyl alcohol or polyvinyl acetate.

Polyvinyl acetate is not water soluble, it’s most likely polyvinyl alcohol, which is.

My print head reject rate is pretty shocking. Seems like the older ones work better than newer ones. I just had a newish one (from 2010) crap out during its initial purge. Maybe I need to spend a day cruising thrift stores and hope for a big score, these are way too expensive to throw away without being able to use them even once.

I have been through 3 so far and I’m not very happy about it. I got a color print head (sometimes be found much cheaper) and was hoping that swapping out the chip that is glued with one from a black printhead would work but it did not - the machine threw an error code.

The last two heads I installed I canceled the purging. I figure it is just using up life of the printhead. The only drawback is it prints black and eventually fades out. I don’t really care about the color though.

I just finished printing out a mold for a cylinder head. Hoping to pour the casting this week.

Cool, post some pics. I would love to try some casting. Ran a sawdust print today to test out a new adhesive, looks promising.

Getting there. Left this in the bed overnight and a lot of binder bled into the surrounding powder. Had to depowder it with a 100psi air gun, but the part mostly held together. I think less saturation and pulling it out right away then baking will be better. Apparently you can retrofit the heater to the 310, so that might be worth doing. The green strength of these parts is remarkably good.

Gave it a try, but straight Ultracal is totally useless. Even with the saturation maxed out, it just comes out like crumbly powder. Definitely needs something added.

Looking at other USG products, I’m thinking about running some USG DryStone in my Z310+ - it requires less water than HydroPerm or UltraCal 30 to set.

Plaster.com has it in 7lb buckets, if I can’t find a local supplier.

As for the HP10 heads - I was getting similar burn-out issues; turns out it I had two issues - a clogged binder line, and ‘flocking’ in the cartridge.

Flocking of Pigment based Ink

Disassembling some ‘dead’ HP10 printheads, I was surprised to find that the fine mesh filter over the inkjets was clogged with a black sludge.

Turns out that the sake I was using chemically combined with the pigments in the black ink, and the pigment particles flocked into large particles. These particles clogged the mesh filter, and the printhead nozzles themselves.

Pre-flushing the printhead with a dye-based ink resolved this issue for me.

Clogged Binder Line

The snap-fit binder line connector on the back of the fast axis has a one-way valve that degraded over time, and wouldn’t let binder flow to the head at more that a slow dribble.

You can determine if you have this problem if ‘pushing’ binder into the septum using the purge kit syringe is much easier that ‘pulling’ binder via the syringe.

I replaced that connector, and my heads no longer burn out, and I get much better saturation.

Dye-based Ink Purge Procedure

I keep a supply of ‘bulk refill’ dye-based yellow HP10 ink ($20 from ebay for 250ml) on hand to do purges with. My purge process is:

  • Select ‘install new head’ via the ‘N’ command from the console - and NOT via the Z-Print application
  • Remove old head
  • Push 30ml of yellow ink into the septum with the purge kit, filling the binder lines
  • Install new print head
  • Press ‘ONLINE’
  • Print a 50x50x50mm solid cube
  • This is usually enough to ‘purge out’ the pigment based black ink, and flow in the dye based yellow

After that, I can reliably print in sake.

That’s great info about the pigment. I replaced (or maybe removed) that one way valve when I was setting up the machine- it was totally blocked.