Cartridge issues leading to workflow issue

Support & Troubleshooting
1

First and foremost, love the Form 4 ecosystem and the Tough Resin family.

However, I am wondering how people have been trouble shooting the bite valve swelling issues on Tough V2.

I contacted FormLabs support, who suggested manual dispensing as a workaround. The issue now is Low Resin warnings are popping up during prints. This is incredibly frustrating; I am not aware of any way to override these remotely on the dashboard, and instead entire prints will wait until I am on site to manually override and continue. This creates big delays and occasionally ruins the prints.

Can anyone give any insight into;

  1. Is there any way to cancel the low resin warnings / print pause feature which does not seem to reliably occur at the start of a print?
  2. Any other issues with the resin dispensing.

Interested to hear any feedback, suggestions or stories.

2

Since this is happening on a F4, I doubt someone can help you.

Previous generation F3 had a way in which if you locked the floater to the full position then you could manually fill the tank or if you were low on resin but sure it will last for the job then this helped to make it work.

The F4 is equipped with an ultrasonic sensor, so no way to deceive it, my best suggestion is to double check on the valve it was common that previous generations valves were not correctly cut open when you insert the cartridge you had to cut them effectively using a blade, can’t be sure if this could be the same issue in your case but worth trying.

1 Like
3

In fact, this is a known issue, and there is a solution.
The new formulation of the ToughV2 resin can cause the valve assembly at the bottom of the cartridge to swell slightly over time, which can lead to slow filling.
The solution appears to be a specially printed washer that is mounted under the cartridge, raising it slightly so that the lever on the valve can operate it more effectively.

I can only pass on this information. We don’t have a Form4 ourselves, so we don’t have any direct experience with the problem or the solution.

There is a support video on YouTube:
Tough V2 resins cartridge shim installation | Form 4 + Form 4L

And a support article:
Using Tough 2000 Resin V2

1 Like
4

Thank you for this.

Agreed tricky to get around it. It’s just a shame that even when I manually fill the tank it still gives low resin warnings and interrupts the print!

5

Thanks for the question!
The solution mentioned by @CARLAYERS is indeed the recommended way to work around this. You can find details on printing the shim to fix the valve issue in the linked support article. We’re providing the shim model as a workaround, but our team is also actively doing testing for a permanent fix.