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:
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.
Hi, everybody! I’m using zprinter 650, is there anyway to decrease vacuum time during printing? It stops for about 10minutes I guess and models start to separate, I think 2-3 minutes will be enough, could anybody help here please?
The vaccum isn’t supposed to run the entire time. If you are seeing delamination on the models there are a few reasons or items to check for…
That you powder settings are correct. (i.e. correct powder/binder type).
Make sure your cleaning station is actually allowing for your cleaning solution to shoot out correctly.
Check your printhead life… generally don’t go past 1000ml on clear and 5ooml on colors.
Check to make sure your heater is working correctly to create a consistent environment.
Check your snowplows, if they are grooved this can cause powder to not spread correctly.
Binder expiration… there are times that if the binder is close to expiring then you might want to clear that out.
These are just a few items off the top of my head. If nothing else call your service provider to have them come take a look.
I have given up on my 310 for now. Has anyone found any good recipes or fair price on consumables? Here are some pics of 3D printed molds used for aluminum casting. Some of the pics are from using traditional sand molds too.
Hi,
lately we have been trying to repair a zPrinter 310+ in the shop and although we found a few problems we are still struggling!
Our goal is to print with sawdust just like you Scott, it would be amazing and cheap and we could use those parts for so many things!
We hope you have some input!
First, there was actual organic junk in the binder tubing which we cleared out, used some alcohol etc. disassembling everything and checking for flow problems. Now there is actually too much binder dripping out of the septum, but if the cartridge is inserted it stops and should provide more than enough flow to meet the requirements of purging and printing. So there should be no flow problems present at the moment.
We think the problem is inside the cartridges, but can’t seem to resolve the issue. We always get the wonderful “head temperature too high” error and we have burned through around 7 HP10 cartridges by now, which we got cheap and have some left, they are amazingly old though, but it would be great if we could figure out a way of reactivating them reliably.
We have disassembled the carts, built a sucktion tool to be able to clean them out and then prime them (with water) but there always seems to be air bubbles inside the carts we cant get rid of, which is likely the cause for them burning out since the air can’t escape through the printhead and stays trapped underneath the micromesh leading to no coolant on the heating element. We also tried soaking them in inkjet cleaning fluid before purging to no avail.
If we try to purge them in their freshly opened state, the zPrint application tries to purge them, sometimes gets the progressbar half full (sometimes just 1 bar) and then errors our on the temperature error . I guess they are useless after they have been overheated once, at least we have never managed to make one of them work again after this error.
So my questions really are:
How would you recommend to reactivate our old cartridges? Is pure water fine as a replacement binder?
I am reading about a console application that seems to be more reliable to changing the heads, but can’t find it anywhere? Should it be in the zPrinter Application folder or is this some custom software? If so could someone provide a download for us?
How old are your printheads?
Could the overheating problem actually be an electrical connection problem?
The rest of the machine is working well, all the axis and pistons etc.
Really stumped here, thought we were close to getting it up and running after cleaning out the junk from the binder lines.
Any help appreciated.
Tamás
