Update:
After my most recent support ticket, Formlabs did agree to replace the machine with a brand new machine. I set it up over the weekend and it is much improved over the first one I received at the start of the year. Everything appears to be working as designed and I am satisfied with Formlabs’s handling of this case. I only wish now that there were some way to make the product work for my workflow.
To the best of my understanding, the extended warranty I purchased does not entitle me to phone support. I did email support and was advised that the touchscreen replacement was a self-service option, but that the part would take 6-8 weeks to receive.
The limited warranty and exclusions for Formlabs equipment are governed by the Terms of Service as well as any local, state, or federal laws, rules, or regulations. Based on my reading, Formlabs could only justifiably refuse to grant a warranty claim if they could prove that the warranty claim arose from damage caused by the disassembly.
The difference here is between someone claiming, “The screen was not working, so I opened the machine,” and another saying, “I opened the machine, and then the screen stopped working.”
I made a separate thread about this topic after receiving my machine and performing many detailed experiments. Based on experimentation and empirical observation, I stand by my conclusion that there is some kind of UV laser scattering effect occurring on the build platform surface, as UV-absorbing materials applied to the surface appear to prevent it from happening.
Your understanding of Z-Compression Correction does not match my own. This parameter merely duplicates the first layer so that the first few layers are not as squished. It is not analogous to Z-offset in FDM printing, which is a parameter that affects the starting distance between the nozzle and build platform.
When I print on the Form 3 with a standard, unmodified build platform, the final sweep of the mixer arm during the initilization happens when the build platform is almost touching the mixer arm. I guess I could perform an experiment, but I would be surprised if I could add more than a mm or so thickness to the build platform without causing a collision during this initialization step.
A magnetic platform would probably require 3-4 mm additional thickness. And even if the machine could handle the additional thickness, it would be printing the first layer 30-40 times on top of itself (assuming a layer height of 0.1), which would cause issues of its own.
I would refer to my earlier thread on this topic which did examine this parameter. There is some early layer merging going on even when the feature is turned off, so it cannot be eliminated completely.
I tried every possible modification to my CAD models to eliminate the problem, and nothing worked.
I have never argued the opposite. I really wanted a machine and ecosystem that perfectly fit my needs and did not require all the band-aids and workarounds. I mistakenly believed that Formlabs’s ecosystem would streamline my own workflow. The unfortunate truth is that Formlabs’s product probably wasn’t the best choice for my business because of the many extra steps and workarounds required to produce end-use parts of acceptable quality.
The Form 3 is great for economical rapid prototyping in various materials whose properties mimic industrial production materials. It may also work well for certain types of end-use parts, especially custom, one-off products. I have no doubt that enterprise customers with deep pockets can and have paid Formlabs to develop materials and workflows to enable new product lines, as I have read in Formlabs’s own White Papers.
At this point, I expect that I may use the Form 3 for rapid prototypes and stick with MSLA for production parts. But we will see.
When I last used the machine earlier this year, certain engineering resins would pre-heat, but standard resins would not. Has this changed? Maybe. But the fact remains that my first few experiences with standard Color resins was that the mixer arm would become stuck because the resin was cold and viscous after starting the pre-print initialization.
To fix this, I would often start a print and then remove the build platform after the heater turned on. Kept in this state, the machine would be ready for use whenever I needed to start a job.
I may have misremembered the behavior here. It may be true that after waiting 30 minutes for the machine to fill, that the machine will pause periodically throughout the print, making the job take significantly longer to complete.
Nevertheless, I stand by my assertion that the behavior appears designed to annoy users into always having a spare resin cartridge on-hand, less they be forced to sacrifice exorbitant and unreasonable amounts of time printing even the smallest job with less than a full 300-400 mL of resin in the tank.
I’m not sure if you’re understanding. I am mixing custom “Color” resins using the Formlabs Color Base and CMYK pigments. In contrast to other Formlabs resins, this comes in an 800 mL Color Base, to which 100 mL of pigment is added, totaling 900 mL of resin (the reserved 100 mL is air to allow the container to be shaken well to mix the colors evenly). By the time the tank is filled once, the cartridge is half depleted. So after using half the cartridge, I get a resin low warning.
If I were to mix a color only once (for example, say I do not like the color I mixed or it is not popular with customers), and each batch of parts takes 50 mL, and I am comfortable printing down to about 100 mL resin remaining in the tank, then I would be forced to wait an additional 3 hours (0.5 hours x 6 jobs) just to start my prints, plus an additional few hours of forced pausing for each small job. While this does not sound like much, the experience is excruciating in light of the fact that all Formlabs would need to do to fix it would be to give the user the option to bypass the filling without waiting 30 minutes.
There is absolutely no excuse for such an unfriendly user experience.
Again, this is based entirely on the warranty terms along with any applicable laws. While Formlabs’s warranty does entitle them to replace with either a new or refurbished product or parts for valid warranty claims, no reasonable customer would expect such a company to offer to replace a brand new, defective product with a refurbished one.
Because the commercial value of a refurbished product is almost always less than that of a new product, offering to replace the more valuable New product with a less valuable Refurbished one immediately upon receipt of a defective New product could be tantamount to fraud. The only defense to this would be the temporary issuance of a Refurbished product if New product inventory is not immediately available, with the option to replace the Refurbished product with a New product at a later date.
Who decides if something is offensive? “Is there not a difference between someone finding something offensive and something actually being offensive?”
The cartoon image depicted a man with a threatening appearance wielding a whip in one hand and a briefcase labeled “Sales” in the other, with the caption “Buy More Resin!” as a Formlabs user looks discouragingly at a Form 3 machine with the caption “Waiting…” on the machine’s display and an empty cartridge in hand. The illustration was intended to represent the artist’s interpretation that forcing users to wait 30 minutes before allowing them to bypass resin fill warnings was likely influenced by Formlabs’s sales team as an attempt to have customers “Buy More Resin!”
The illustration was originally published to this forum, where it remained without controversy for several months, and with only positive comments by other users, until shortly after the interaction between myself and an easily offended Formlabs employee.
As you have not read the entirely of the interaction or examined all the evidence, I can only reiterate that the behavior of this Formlabs employee was unprofessional. Following the emails, a different Formlabs employee phoned me to express her agreement that the warnings I received were an inappropriate reaction and that the matter would be addressed internally to ensure it does not happen again.