Troubleshooting the Anycubic Wash and Cure Machine

I love my Anycubic Photon resin printer. After months of using various buckets and a UV nail dryer to wash and cure my resin prints, I ordered the Wash & Cure Machine from Anycubic.

It was great…at first.

Not long after I started using it though, it started ‘clunking’ during the Wash cycle:

Annoying to say the least. So I contacted Anycubic Support and they got back to me fairly quickly. But they suggested that I tighten the screw that holds the propeller in the tank (it was already tight).

They also suggested I add more IPA to the tank – my guess was that it would weigh down the tank more than the 1000ml I had in it. Unfortunately, IPA was scarce thanks to COVID. I set it aside for a while as I didn’t have any resin prints to do and actually forgot about it.

Today, I was finally able to get more IPA and try it again. No luck. Then I was determined to solve the problem since I had some files I wanted to print and use the machine.

Taking it apart revealed the issue almost immediately: under the bed, there is a stepper motor with a spinner on it that contains two magnets.

One of the magnets was rubbing on the roof of the underside of the bed and actually scraping a rut in the aluminum. The magnets have a M3 machine screw that appears to screw into the blue propeller but the problematic one wasn’t catching at all and floating up as the propeller got up to speed, which of course would make the awful grinding sound and eventually stop moving completely.

To fix it, I simply added nuts to both magnets (to balance them out since the other one didn’t need a nut to stay in place) and surprise, it works as expected again.

Hopefully this helps someone else as I wasn’t able to find any similar issues documented anywhere – usually the most common problem had to do with the actual tank and the propeller inside it. That issue is usually due to a loose propeller screw or using something other than IPA in the tank that would cause corrosion of the bearing or the magnets in the tank itself.

I actually ordered a second tank when they became available, not to address this issue but to make it easier to move IPA around and have multiple tanks ready to go. Trying the new tank didn’t solve my issue either which ruled out the tank’s propeller.

At least it was an easy fix and only took a few minutes to disassemble the machine.