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From: Todd Grimm[SMTP:tgrimm@atiaustin.com]
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 1996 9:48 AM
To: rp-ml@bart.lpt.fi
Subject: Zephyr Recoater on SLA
A call to all SLA users who have the Zephyr recoating system. .......
If you are interested in participating, ................
Todd A. Grimm
Todd,
We have been using the zephyr recoating system on one of our SLA-500s and an SLA-350. We have built several test parts with huge trapped volumes (200X200X75 mm [8X8X3 inch]). Also built a part with multiple trapped volumes (100 cells attached to each other, each cell looking like a pencil box 75mm [3 inch] deep.) No part has drain holes. All parts were built just fine. No mounting, no layer shifting, no nothing. Moreover, we saw an improvement in the surface finish of vertical walls on our SLA 500. To cap it all, all parts were built with a single sweep (3D recommends 3 sweeps for trapped volumes even with the zephyr recoating system). I was almost tempted to build trapped volumes as big as trash cans just to test the limits of zephyr. But then Dave would have used one of those cans on me.
Guys at 3D deserve lot of credit. Now, why does 3D recommend three sweeps? Are there some trapped volumes which are more likely to fail? Is it geometry dependent rather than the size of the trapped volume? Could anyone provide any insight?
Wait, the story is not complete yet. We had four to five crashes in the past ten days on these machines. None of the crashes was trapped volume related. Nothing appeared to be wrong with the build files. Mysteriously, the same files ran fine the second time. We have Buildstation software 1.8 on both the machines. Could it be due to lack of repeatability?
Kamesh
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