Delays in keycap printing – and progress

RERF TEST

Apolgies for any delays and people waiting on keycaps….

I believe I may have reached the end of life of my original Photon Mono printer. for the past couple of months, i’ve been having more and more print failures, and have had no idea why. I’ve approached the problem analytically to figure out what’s wrong

Where it started –

I had a proper working file that ‘just worked’ – exposure about 35s for the first layers and about 1.8s per other layer

That started failing a bit. some keys were printing incomplete. I increased the exposure slightly and success again.

More fails, this time the first layers were coming off the build plate. I increased the exposure for the first 4 layers and success again.

had many minor creeps of fails, up to now where i’m at around 50s for the first layers exposure and 2.2s per layer.

I figured maybe the temperature in the conservatory is too low – Nope, iterating a bunch of exposures with the printer near the radiator in the living room also had nothing but failures.

So, after a good 15 fails in a row, many caused my me experimenting with extremes, i’ve given up with the photon mono. There’s many things it could be, but I’m thinking it’s feasible that the LCD has finally ‘failed’. I’ve easily gotten 1500 hours of actual print time on the thing – well over 1000 will be just the production keycaps at 6.5 hours each!

So, back to the point of the article. Those things in the picture are a R E R F TEST for my Anycubic Photon Mono-X

I’m dialling it in to start printing the keycaps. First one’s going right now (50% UV power, 3.5 seconds exposure and 45s base layer if you like to know)

IF this keyboard prints – fantastic, I can print two at a time in just 5 hours! i’ll be through the backlog in no time 🙂

Thanks for listening and sorry again for the delays!

Dean