3L Tray Failures - Part 2 - 3L Owners, PLEASE READ

@Phil.O

I’m not clear of what your indicating when you say ‘avoid printings when printing if space allows’. Can you clarify?

We have followed every single FL Support recommendation regarding placement of parts on the platform.

@Titon You definitely nailed it.

It appears to be the same story with the FL Fuse 1 SLS printer. If you go over to that Fuse 1 forum, there’s a poor guy over there (@LEADNAV) which is having a common experience. It seems he’s also a beta user even though it was sold to him as a fully capable machine.

I still love my little F3’s, but it doesn’t help us in a production environment. I have a meeting next week with the FL engineering team to go over their test results and see if we can outline next steps.

Just to be clear…I’m not a “poor” guy as the system itself has been running amazing parts and the Formlabs support team has been outstanding. I am however, definitely frustrated with the waste and cost of material over what they promised. After a few months of troubleshooting we finally found out it was really a case of the printer not being able to print anywhere near the advertised material refresh rate. There were a few other “lemons” in hardware but they replaced those components.

In my year long search for “production run” capabilities… “SLS” and MJF are the only true options out there…period.

After a year of trying, there is no true way to run “professional parts” (instead of toys) on any FDM printer and as far as Resin…it makes great detailed models and prototypes but there is no way I’d deal with the post processing and mess involved with that in any production run environment. It also does not have the strength or temperature resistance that we needed. There are definetly uses for it though…just not in our product line up.

With SLS, there is literally no real post processing pains and the system we have for blasting and dying, leaves us with flawless, identical, rugged parts.

Can’t express enough how happy we are with the SLS decision and the Fuse 1 has been doing outstanding running our production parts…

However, I do think Formlabs need to be a bit more transparent on the true expectations of these machines and materials, and adjust.

After lots of headache of trying to dial this thing in at their “highest recommended refresh rate”… we found out that the machine just cannot successfully print within the advertised “30-50%” range. We are running successfully now at 70% refresh and starting to push that down to 60% (I imagine the resin folks have no idea what that means so you can read my other posts but essentially my material waste is a lot higher per part than advertised. Nearly double as I am tossing half of it in the garbage).

Again, support has been great at helping me but like all corporate companies…there is obviously a breakdown between the support teams and what the engineers are passing down.

Anyone looking at rugged production runs… GO SLS!! But I would have preferred the upgraded Fuse 1+ and/or the cost of material has to come down to make up for the unrealistic expectations they are putting out when considering your cost per part and market.

No idea what this thread is about as I have not read it. I just got tagged in it but if you want to drool over some parts here ya go. For these, I am running a hundred units in roughly 30 hours consistently, 70% refresh rate, with about 2 hours of labor blasting them off and dying them in our heated tank. They look identically perfect…

“Hole Punch”/Flat head screw driver sheath in Nylon 12 GF. You can’t break it…we tried…



Sorry to imply the ‘poor guy’ comment. Hopefully no offence was taken. I’ve been tracking you through the SLS treads and the common theme that we’ve personally dealt with with an over-promise/under deliver, has been an issue with us from the first day we engaged with Form on our purchase of these ‘new’ 3L printers.

I’m glad that the tide is definitely turning for you and I genuinely appreciate your insight on the SLS feedback. We’re in the market for a SLS unit ourselves.

@jdubose
My apologies, “avoiding printings when printing”
was meant to be
“avoiding printing parallel across the X/Y Axis, and to see if you can set the parts more diagonally as space allows”
I am not sure how those words ended up getting lost - hope this clarifies it for you!

Don’t get me wrong. I have my 3L and it’s an amazing machine but “avoiding” things just to get a proper print is not the way to go about business.

Here’s the deal. I purchased this machine with the intentions of printing larger sections. I, unlike some, am not using this machine in full scale production. It’s a hobby for me so I have not felt the pain as some have that use it to sell product on a daily basis. I have however “paid” for 6k in support just to make sure that i can get something replaced if needed. Now that being said if the machine was not ready for primetime as a customer some of the support fees should be reimbursed to customers since this machine has had ongoing issues from the start. That’s all I am suggesting. It’s like continuing to pay for an extended warranty because it’s a lemon to begin with.

Sad really in my eyes. I have not printed with it in over 3 months since I did not want to waste another tank and resin. I in fact still use my Form 2 since it seems to be less of a loss at the moment.

Formlabs is not taking a loss on this since the customer is technically already paying for a new tank to be sent to them if one fails. It’s built in the 3k warranty that we have already paid for.

Hi @Titon,

Thank you for sharing this feedback - I’m sorry to hear that the Form 3L and associated support have been falling short of your expectations. We certainly want to ensure that you are receiving value from the support services you purchased. I would advise opening or continuing this dialogue with our Support team who will do their best to make sure this is the case.

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