The noise complaints are indicative of the kinds of primiary environments the Form is operating; an office. Mine competes with a plasma cnc, chopsaw, and a huge dust collector unit and an HVAC. Let me tell you, it’s quiet machine, IMO. However, in an office environment, I can see the validity of the complaint, and also the questioning of where it’s coming from. It’s interesting that the portable Bukito with syncromesh I have beats out both MakerBot and Form1 for decibel levels, now. I should run decibel tests on the various bots and machines I’m around on a daily basis.
The noise is significant (to me) in my office when the machine is right next to my computer. My inkjet printer doesn’t take 4 hours to print something so I can tolerate a little noise for a little while. This is more like starting your car one day and finding you have a hole in the muffler - unexpected and not welcome.
That moaning aside - the first batch of prints I did were a mess. Most significant was a “lip” that developed on several of the rings I was printing. I was trying a variety of different supports and angles to see if I could find a workflow for consistent prints. On this batch I had several copies of two models using the Form supports and some B9 generated supports. These were all printed at .25 (not something I should have bothered with) using the grey resin. I thought the lip was because I had not placed the supports properly using the B9 software but I had the same issues using the default Form settings.
The second batch was significantly better and I think the third batch I did last night is even better than that. Still noisy though so I may have to relocate the machine.
It seems to vary based on the print. I’ve noticed it started on layer 20/900 the other day. It happens for a while and seems to speed up and slow down and get louder and quieter during the process and then stops. Maybe it’s the new normal.
If you are printing something thin and small, you will get really annoyed really fast, because the peeling and the “dot matrix sound” is much faster and more often. If you are printing a thicker/larger model, it’s less annoying.
In either case, I saw no significant improvement in surface quality for my jewelry prints, so I’m going back to version 1.3. I can bet the change had more to do with failure ratios people were having, and not the surface quality.
It’s just sad that I will miss out on the other new features if Form Labs decides to stick to this new peeling method.
** For me, the new noisy peel method renders the Form1 unusable as slick office machine that it was, and turns it into something that belongs in a warehouse or on the factory floor.**
I hope form labs at least gives us a choice in the software options to select which peel method we want to use.
How do I go about rolling back to 1.3? I don’t have copies of the older versions of the software. I tried rolling back to an older version of the firmware (1.3e) but that doesn’t seem to take hold.
I tried to upload the new firmware, and I got a message about “unable to update DFU device.” or something like that. The printer went dark and I had to unplug it for a while before it would work again. I’ve tried this 3 times now with the same result.
Reports of the printer being louder after 1.4 has been greatly exaggerated. I’ve done a couple of prints on the new firmware now and observe that it’s no louder than before.
My printer sits in a room next to where my baby sleeps and I ran prints thru the night. No issues with the noise at all.
Teck - the reports are not greatly exaggerated. The machine is noticeably louder. Perhaps it’s not louder when you hear it running in another room but it’s certainly louder when you have to listen to it run for several hours 18" away from you.
I think 1.4 was loud enough that I’ve rolled back to 1.3 and I don’t even notice the machine when it’s printing now.
In this case, the firmware update was just to keep version numbers synchronized, to ensure that those users still using an older version of PreForm have the latest version. There is a brief blog post here – http://formlabs.com/blog/2014/05/22/formlabs-141/. It doesn’t have any reference to the firmware version tick, but does have a few other details on what went into this latest upgrade.