I had almost the exact same experience.
Except mine just kept having more problems…Grinding noises, and then the platfrom stopped lifting in sync with the wiper arms… all kinds of mess.
Formlabs had me return it and shipped my a refurbished printer with a full warrantee.
That printer has been a gem to own. Not a single failed print, resin senor error or other issue.
As someone who has experience with manufacturing in china… I can pretty well tell you what happened.
Either Formlabs made some change in production…switching to a new manufacturing company… OR their manufacturing company changed something… and the result was that Formlabs recieved a container full of Printers that had been badly assembled or that used components that were not to spec.
These printers got distributed all over and were only discovered when they started to reveal their poor quality in use.
They replaced these printers… but discovered that some users got a new printer that had the same issues. Which was very bad for their reputation.
Because there was no way to identify which printers in the supply chain were the bad ones, they started replacing the bad ones with Older, refurbished ones that they could KNOW pre-dated whatever production issue they were then dealing with.
My refurbished printer has restored my confidence in Formlabs with its reliability.
Same sort of experience on my end. First printer they sent me was a dud. Then they sent me another which ended up having funky bearings and eventually failed completely. Now I’m on my 3rd printer which is supposed to be my 2nd printer with new bearings but I realized after careful inspection that it was indeed a different printer. Despite customer support telling me otherwise. I’m not keen on being lied to by a company I have paid 1,000s to.
Well this 3rd printer has its own issues. It has intense knocking during the start and end of each layer for the first few layers of every print. My warranty period is now up so here’s to hoping this one doesn’t completely fail on me like the first two. I dont use the printer everyday. There are all these Formlabs asskissers in the forms who praise their machines for printing flawlessly 24/7 and I have had nothing but issues with my 3 machines.
I’m starting to wonder if all 3 machines I was sent all had been refurbished machines from the onset. Maybe that first printer was refurbished and was sold to me as new? The laser in that first printer was failing as soon as I ran it. Which leads me to believe that the laser inside was not new.
Customer support has been amazing all and all but there is a bit of a disconnect between them and whats actually going on with the hardware they sell. They play dumb sometimes and I understand that to be a countermeasure to angry customers who might not need the whole story.
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