Was your 3D printer working fine over the summer, and now it’s not? With colder temperatures comes an overall surge in print failure reports — particularly with resin-based printers that might reside in outbuildings, basements, or garages. If you think this applies to you, don’t miss [Jan Mrázek]’s tips on improving cold-weather print results. His tips target the main reasons prints fail, helping to make the process a little more resilient overall. [Jan]’s advice is the product of long experience and experimentation, so don’t miss out.
With environmental changes comes the possibility that things change just enough to interfere with layers forming properly. The most beneficial thing overall is to maintain a consistent resin temperature; between 22 and 30 degrees Celsius is optimal. A resin heater is one solution, and there are many DIY options using simple parts. Some of the newer (and more expensive) printers have heaters built in, but most existing hobbyist machines do not.
Temperature control isn’t the only thing, either. Layer formation and build plate adhesion can all be improved by adding rest times between layers. Yes, this increases print time. It also allows resin to settle before the next layer, improving adhesion and preventing blooming (a rough texture caused by an imperfect cure.) Since resin flows less readily at lower temperatures, rest times can help improve results. The best setting depends heavily on your particular setup, so [Jan] gives tips on finding optimal rest times.
Most common knowledge and advice from well-meaning communities online focuses on increasing exposure time or blaming the build plate. [Jan] feels that these are ultimately the wrong way to go about addressing failures. Usually, an environmental change (like the arrival of winter) has simply pushed a printer that was not optimized in the first place outside of its narrow comfort zone. A little optimization can set things back on track, making the printer more resilient and reliable overall.
I am so glad to see something like this in text form instead of yet another video I have to sit through.
Very in-depth and very informative. I haven’t had any failures this bad in a while, but I have had some of the more minor artifacts. Definitely going to be bookmarking this one and referring to it regularly.
Very good and informative.Thanks
I just did an experiment with my Mars 4 DLP in my shop at freezing temperature. I heated the resin vat with a heat gun until its surface hit 100 degrees F, stirred it, then repeated it until the resin was 90-100 degrees F after stirring it. I also heated the print bed a little bit. The heating process took me 10-15 minutes to do with my heat gun on the 50% setting (~700 watts).
I use an inexpensive grow tent placed on it’s side with a small temp controlled heater in it. That works well enough in winter, as for settings. I have not had a tenth of the issues with resin prints adhesion/splitting/surface quality after adopting uvtools and adding rest times to my prints. I read through the findings of a blog post from this person from like 2022 and just adapted the suggestions to my workflow and I was having a blast just printing and not stressing about failures. I still come out ahead time wise with resting on my mono 4k because I can speed up the other actions and the settings are consistent (ie behave predictably) per resin as long as I keep enclosure temps similar.
I went ahead and looked up the specific UVtools post I went off of from forever ago if someone was curious.
I use an inexpensive grow tent placed on it’s side with a small temp controlled heater in it. That works well enough in winter, as for settings. I have not had a tenth of the issues with resin prints adhesion/splitting/surface quality after adopting uvtools and adding rest times to my prints. I read through the findings of this blog and just adapted the suggestions to my workload and I was having a blast just printing and not stressing about failures. I still come out ahead time wise with resting on my mono 4k because I can speed up the other actions and the settings are consistent (ie behave predictably) per resin as long as I keep enclosure temps similar. The blog that sold me on it was.
https://blog.honzamrazek.cz/2022/07/step-by-step-guide-on-perfect-bed-adhesion-and-elephant-foot-removal-in-uvtools-3/
I dunno how I screwed that up but I blame posting from a cellphone sigh