Don’t worry this is not about cleaning the laser optics of the Glowforge, this is about doing scheduled maintenance on different lasers (or even knowing you were supposed to). So I had gone to bed printing a frame for the smoke goggles for the flight simulator on the Formlabs Form 3, and woke to this disaster (no, not the mess on the floor, that’s long standing):
I have had a rare failure on the Form3 but almost always the entire part falls off the build platform, or you forget supports. All SLA print failures are grim since the failed part falls on the FEP sheet in the tray unbeknownst to the laser which keeps fusing resin, and you end up with a blob hard fused to the sheet. If you are very, very lucky you can gently reach into the goo (with nitrile gloves on!) and very gently peel the part off with your finger tips and not tearing the FEP sheet which would dump 1L of resin into the guts of the printer. So given this failed inside the part itself, I immediately contacted one of the engineers at form who we work with, who was concerned about that failure mode (it basically shattered). Support had me turn on diagnostic mode which lets them log onto the printer (and see out through the laser!) they noted the optical window seemed hazy and I should do scheduled cleaning (which I had never heard of). So a complicated process of removing the tray, unscrewing 18 screws in a specific order (note the red oval showing resin glueing some of the screws in place), then very very carefully remove the window (a cover over the laser assembly). When I held it to the light the window looked like the windows of a 1970s Phillip Morris executive’s car. It took 15 minutes of cleaning with 99.9% IPA (the solvent for resin) with microscope wipes and lint-free swabs. Next is to clean the rollers, 2 of which were locked in place by resin. Despite never having had a leak, this kind of happens over time (see yellow boxes). Getting that off was a chore. The rollers are case hardened steel so I printed a PLA scraper of the right diameter to crack that stuff off then polished it with the IPA. All told 30 minutes before the window and rollers were back in spec.
Finally they then have you print a specific test model that comes pre-sliced to test the optical alignment. Note those tiny verticals are below the stated resolution of the printer (25um) so I apparently did a good job! My wash station IPA was dirty so the slots didn’t clean as well as they could have, but it showed it all worked.
