Last week, an aviation parts manufacturer in northern Zhejiang was commissioning an electron beam selective melting system when the third part in the run warped; by the fifth layer the recoater blade had carved a diagonal gouge through the semi-cured titanium powder bed, sending fines drifting throughout the chamber. The team had to shut down, evacuate the chamber, and wait for the chamber temperature to drop below 80°C before cleaning the powder—a four-hour process. The plant then adjusted parameters around preheat scanning strategy, charging effects, and equipment aging, involving 12 parts all sent back for remelting and recalculation, along with a process correction that moved the focusing current from 2.1 A to 2.35 A. During preheating, the electron beam must scan in blocks with gaps rather than uniformly across the whole powder bed. If the gaps between blocks are too large, temperature gradients cause edge powder to sinter into hard agglomerates that jam and damage the recoater blade; only after narrowing the gaps and reducing point spacing did the powder layer stabilize. To save preheat time, the scan speed was raised by one-third, and the measured porosity increased by more than 0.8 percentage points. Airborne powder in the chamber stems from charging effects—static charge accumulating in the non-conductive powder layer. After adjusting the beam spot offset, airborne powder dropped by 80%. Raising the preheat temperature improves the surface conductivity of the powder layer, but α-phase grain growth in the titanium alloy reduced room-temperature tensile elongation by one-third, and fatigue failure occurred at 60% of the rated cycle count. On equipment nearly five years old, aging of the electron gun's focusing coil makes the melt pool diameter larger at the same focusing parameters; copying new-machine parameters leads to excessive overlap and balling, with surface roughness at one point nearly three times worse. All of the above failure details concern powder spreading, preheating, and melt pool control for titanium alloy powder beds in electron beam selective melting, involving drift in powder layer resistivity, local pre-sintering, static-charge-induced powder blowing, and the influence of particle size distribution on the process window. No other material systems or powder grades were involved.