@Titon Have you cleaned the lasers on your 3L lately?
Did this print successfully with legacy settings? My machine has been super reliable on Legacy.
I cleaned the optical window. Barely any dust at all.
I wanted to try the new supports again just to see if itās improved.
Leonhart88, I mostly use legacy as well but like the way the new supports come away from the model easier. But this was too easyā¦lol
1 Like
Its a shame mate. Sorry to hear you have issues still. I never had a Form2 but my 3 and 3L are running very well. I always use default setting and rarely have issues. But yes the way its placed is not optimized yet. If you compare you see legacy put supports equal across the part while default seems to focus at the start of a part. Increase point size and density for bigger parts is what can be done. The legacy setting often left me with small chunks broken out of the part which cost me more time to fix. The new support doesnāt do that. Mostly nothing or some light bumps which easily removed by sanding.
Quit odd this. Im sure this would print fine on mine. 
Could be the new tank but will see. I will increase the amount of the new supports and see what happens. Although I ended up with chunks in my new tank.
Hi Titon,
Iām sorry to hear you are still having issues! I would go ahead and reach out to support again with this update if you have not yet to help with additional documentation- them having the logs/photos of these attempts along with the updated form file for reference should help move it forward.
I also like how the new support shapes break off, but not at the expense of print reliability unfortunately 
Let us know if this part prints fine with Legacy settings, very curious!
1 Like
Printed fine with legacy settings. Iām increasing the point size and amount of supports for default and will let you know how it comes out.
I also just finished printing the optics test and it passed with flying colors. So the tank seems fine.
1 Like
Thanks for the update. That matches exactly what Iāve seen as well.
Iāve also seen that upping the default point size improves reliabilityā¦but I havenāt experimented enough to see if upping the size makes it harder to remove.
One would assume the cross sectional area is the sameā¦so it would make it harder to removeā¦but maybe thatās not true.
1 Like
@Titon, any updates on the increased point size/supports for your model? I just went through several rounds with support trying to get rid of warping on part and in the end was basically told that we would just have to live with it.
@AllOnScale, I would definitely understand if not but do you have any of your larger models where you would be willing to share your .form file to let some other interested users try out as a test print?
Iām always surprised when I see users having such regular success and accuracy with this machine. Ours has proven to be useful for us but I have never gotten particularly accurate parts or been able to get clean mating surfaces and everything we print has at least some level of warping. Iāve requested Formlabs provide a larger-scale test print several times over the past couple years but I donāt ever see that happening. It would be great to at least have a larger model that we knew should print correctly in order to test our machine/resin tanks.
No idea if this helps, but after a few months of not printing anything on the 3L, today I did a large print (1019 layers, ~15 hours) of something that needed to be accurately perfect down to 0.05mm and it worked flawlessly. The resin used was Rigid 4000.
The supports were the āDefault (v2)ā and lowered to 0.90 density (from the recommended 1.00) and to 0.45 touchpoint size (from the recommended 0.50). Also Mini Rafts were used (itās getting hard to remove full rafts of Rigid 4000 on the 3L) even against PreFormās recommendation due to the size of the part.
The part came along perfect in all axis and the accuracy was exactly as intended, a perfect fit.
The only nag was that the prediction was ~12 hours and it took 3 hours more.
Sorry, canāt do that as most IP rights belong to my customers.
We are discussing two issues here. We have 99% succes rate so I don;t have the failed prints @Titon was having. But I do have tolerance issues. Printing single parts is fine but I regularly have large parts that I split and glue but there tolerances can be quite terrible. We actually invested in a fdm printer recently because of this instead of another 3L. Its a shame really.
Something changed though because the model in the beginning of this post had good tolerances. and fitted straight together
Thanks for the response, I assumed that would be the case but thought it was worth asking.
Yeah, I canāt say we completely regret our 3L purchase. At the time it was the only large format resin printer and weāve definitely been able to adapt to make good use of it but it really has felt like weāve paid a premium to be beta testers for a product that hasnāt really lived up to the marketing.
That said, considering the amount of tinkering, wasted resin, and lost time that goes into each new model I think if we had it to do over I would recommend going with one of the large format options from Phrozen or Anycubic or the like. Significantly cheaper machines and resin with 99% of the features and the ability to use better more feature-rich open-source slicers.
Weāve been seriously considering purchasing a Fuse 1+ but with our current 3L experience Iām leaning against taking the risk of spending another $65k for the privilege of beta-testing another machine.
Yeah, formlabs recommended the Rigid 4000 as well. Weāll probably have to go ahead and give that a try but $150/L of resin was already painful, I the idea of doubling that cost (not to mention the increased wear on the tank). Have you all been using the Rigid 4000 for a while or did you just recently start? Iām curious about what the actual life will be in practice for the resin tanks when using that.
I upped the point size to 60 and 125 on the density. It worked and the model printed fine use standard gray resin. I have not used the tough 1500 yet as thatās my go to in a lot of cases. Still using my form 2 for that but I have a new tank for the 3L that eventually iād like to try.
1 Like
At that point I wonder if the new supports are any better or worse than the old if youāve had to up their size. Any notable differences? What touch point settings were you using before? My standard with normal resins is 0.4mm and 0.3mm with Tough resins (on Legacy).
Following up on this. I have needed to up the support amount to 120% and increase the size of the supports to at least .6 in order to get a consistent good print. If I allow preform to automatically place the supports itās never enough even though preform says it is. I find the new supports still are the better option for removal in the end though. If I do not do this I get layer shifting on my prints that is sometimes easy to sand out but Iād rather not do this. The standard gray resin is still the most forgiving and the tough 1500 is the bugger. Cleaning up the supports with tough 1500 is a nightmare since they are of course tougher.
2 Likes
Really impressive 