I’ve had my Form 2 for about a week now, purchased second hand on Ebay, it was also from a reliable source who regularly serviced the machine yearly, which can be seen by the logs on the machine and can also be backed up by the shop that services the machine I purchased, here’s some advice to others thinking about getting the Form 2 refurbished or second hand.
The carrier tray which you insert and attached the VAT to will eventually go, the contacts on this machine are poorly designed from contamination on surface contacts. In order to fix this you will either pay a lot of money for Formlabs to repair, as this will require “CALIBRATION OF THE CARRIER TRAY”
If you decide to try repair this yourself, you will have to come up with a fix to the contacts by either ordering the smd contact yourself, or jeri rig something like this guy link below
I’ve tried to clean the contacts with electrical contacts cleaner and still getting carrier tray issues, I will have to go through the route of order the smd contact and resolder this myself, what a pain and for all the money you pay, really not worth it. Get yourself a cheap chinese SLA printer and you will get your money’s worth.
I found that wiping the contacts with IPA on kitchen paper, every time I inserted the tank, worked for a very long time, until eventually one of the prongs on the contact broke off.
Hello Benjamin.
Calibration of the carrier tray is easy.
Before removing your existing tray, measure the distance from the top of the tray to the glass window on 4 corners.
Make a test print consisting of 4 squares of 1 mm thickness in the 4 corners of the build plate. Print this. Check the thickness of the first layer and of the finished squares. makes pictures of each.
Remove the tray and resolder your smd contact.
Reseat the tray and set it to the same height as before
Run the same test print as before. If your first layer is non existent, move your carrier tray down. If it is too thick, move it up. Once the first layer is the same as before, run a full print and verify the 1 mm thickness of the square.
The tray screws are M3 x 0.4, I believe. 1 turn of the screw is 0.4 mm.
Note that all Formlabs build plates are in fact not flat. So use the same one for before/ after comparision.
Generally speaking, the height of the carrier tray will influence the compression of the first layer in the 4 corners of the build plate ( level of the plate ). A software setting is available to change the height of the build platform as well but this is a general setting ( does not influence the level of the platform ).
The VAT being elastic, there is quite a bit of play allowed with this.
Thanks for your reply, but why does my $20 Toaster heat up faster than my thousand dollar printer? seems like it takes 30 minutes to heat up, where I can make toast in 5 minutes.