If you find a solution, please share it with us. I have the same problem. I only have two chambers, but on one of them I also see “bulges” at this height. It is not noticeable on small parts, but the larger and bulkier the part, the more noticeable the bulge is.
And just a question on all this maintenance you are performing…
Are you paying for Basic or extended service on these printers still? If so, are you needing to convince Formlabs to send you new Beds and Gaskets every 3 months and/or is that covered? Or are you just buying all these replacement components yourself?
I just can’t justify Full service anymore as I couldn’t even get a rep on scene for the first year I had it and was down for months regardless of paying for it… and right now I just have the Basic Service plan but to get a replacement part of anything I can imagine it would take a lot of convincing on our end if we discovered a faulty part on our own.
Just wandering how you are handling that now with multiple machines.
I was about to buy a second Fuse 1+ but torn on that and this going forward…
I think the bulge is going to happen regardless of anything you do. It is unfortunately by design in the temperature break currently used.
Formlabs suggested NOT taping or heat caulking it as it is “supposed to be sloppy” in there as to not touch the chamber walls otherwise it would transfer heat down past it into the chamber… is what they told me.
I imagine it would take an improvement of this heat break system and/or at least a tighter “dimensional” tolerance to the sidewalls of the chamber to fix this.
Their suggestion was to run “Nylon 12 Default” as this has some sort of magic in it to “minimize” this bulge but in the end they suggest just not printing anything in the first few inches of the chamber… an just add that used powder to the pile $$
So their solution is, don’t use the first few centimeters of the chamber? Great solution! So their words are - We sold you an overpriced printer that has a design flaw and doesn’t work as it should.
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We have the ESP and basic wear and tear parts are included in that. So we get that stuff for free. From what i have calculated we have saved a few euros having the ESP compared to buying all the serviceparts.
Just last week we had a service tech here to change heaters in 2 out of 3 printers due to wear and tear. As i said, we push our printers to the limit by running them very hard.
For us, it´s been worth it. Not saying it is for everyone tho.
It’s really strange how many problems some people seem to have with their fuse. This year we were back at Formnext in Frankfurt, Germany, one of the largest trade fairs for additive manufacturing, and spoke to our dealer who looks after Formlabs customers. As we have been a customer here for a long time, we buy all our material, spare parts and maintenance from this dealer and not from Formlabs directly. This has nothing to do with a dislike of Formlabs - after all, we use their printers and materials - but we simply try to have as few purchasing sources as possible.
Again, the internal feedback we have received is that most customers work very well with their Fuse printers, but there are a few who just seem to have one problem after another.
So far we have only had 2 failures in the 2 years we have had our Fuse1+. Once a temperature sensor failed, which had to be replaced. Here we still had a service plan, so a technician was sent by our dealer.
Then we had the problem with the dents in our parts. We described this in this post:
Replacement Fuse 1 not working - PART 2 - Support & Troubleshooting / Fuse 1 - Formlabs Community Forum
I have the impression that our bumps were at the same height as the problem images shown.
In our case, it turned out that we had the faulty print beds.
Two new ones were sent to us. I changed one myself and saved one and had the technician change it again when he was on site for the annual service. In this way, I wanted to test whether the installation might cause errors with the print chamber. Both chambers have been working without any problems since then.
We don’t print very often with our Fuse1+. On average it is 1 print job per week. This often includes express jobs where the chamber is only a quarter full. We then print several small parts exactly in the problem area shown, currently without any problems.
Our Fuse currently has a success rate of over 95%.
I can therefore at least not support the design error mentioned. Not much help at this point, I know, sorry.
My experience with extensive service repairs on the Fuse is very limited, as on the one hand we only had a few problems and on the other hand these were usually repaired by a technician.
However, the problem with the dents also took several weeks in total, as the support communication was restarted several times and we had to make different test prints.
In the meantime, we also worked with just such a placeholder in Preform.
I just had a look at the support articles and found the following:
Layer shifting (SLS)
This article shows a few very similar looking images. In fact, I have to say, just based on my previous experience, I would have suspected the problem in two places (just to get rid of my ideas here):
One, a possible improperly assembled build chamber. Since our two chambers work with the same design and are also used by other customers, I see the problem more with individual chambers.
Possibly play in the Z spindle, the faulty print beds or incorrectly assembled print beds. For example, these must be correctly aligned and fitted with heat-resistant threadlocker.
Secondly, problems with the recoater.
After each print, we ensure that the roller is clean and that no powder residue accumulates. To do this, we always move the roller back and forth and vacuum it with a brush attachment.
We also clean the guide rails on the sides and the drive gears. Powder can also accumulate in the teeth here over time.
The statement that the dosing offset does not seem to have any effect should be another red flag. Either something is not working with the doser or the chamber is leaking and swallowing powder. I would take down the print bed of the chamber that was used for printing when the offset was set to 5 and look inside to see if more powder has accumulated here.
Maybe I’ll film our routine at the next print job, just to show our setup and give you some ideas or suggestions.
Today after several failed prints in a row and a complete clean out of everything you mentioned done already… they are requesting for me to dissaemble and remover the coater motor and roller assembly to send photos of it to them… so I am about to do that.
And yes I am quickly realizing you need at least two Fuse printers to keep at least one operational when the other breaks as it does take months to get it resolved and operational again.
Will keep posting the troubleshooting they put me through and hopefully the resolution to this issue as it goes for future reference.
But just for the record our issues started on October 21 2024. So we are on week 7 of trying to figure all this out. As someone who works with CNC operations… having a machine down for just a week can be painful but in the CNC machine world those companies generally seem quick to get you back up and running with local representation. I do wish we had that with Formlabs so hopefully they can get to that level eventually.
I had to make a minor change to my Pedestal for a bigger “no go” zone based on my prints with this spacer. I also made the Dam walls thicker too.
The screenshot is from my earlier post.
Fuse Pedestal.stl (96.0 KB)
In our experience, this placeholder does not really need to be printed.
During the time we had this error pattern, we placed this placeholder in preform, locked the position and then packed the remaining components. Finally, before uploading, we removed the placeholder again so that this area remained empty.
In this way, no sintered component has to be disposed of and it only takes a little longer.
This what I do too, but I manually place my parts in the slicer for total control of how my parts are oriented. I also us the label feature to add a “lot code” for traceability to each part.
The issue I had with my first version was it allowed me to place parts within the ‘extended layer shift area’ so although I avoided the major bulge with the first version, I still had a subtle shift that I would prefer not be present.
It’s frustrating when parts keep failing at the same height, no matter the chamber! Your theory could be right—perhaps there’s a deeper design flaw at play
I just want to jump in and say that in my couple thousand hours of printing I have not had a chamber fail out like this. I’ve had the band of deformation which support has helped out with and it did get better. The chamber that came with my newest fuse seems to not have this problem at all, so far anyway.
So far we are still troubleshooting the major failures before we get to the major burring issues on all edges when running Default settings versus Legacy settings.
The current doser failure issues appear to have been from a faulty coupler on the doser motor being loose and sloppy.
The loose coupler seems to cause the roller to be “sloppy” on its transitions enough to cause all the issues that we’ve seen with total failures…at least the past two prints, after the motor swap, were successful after a dozen back to back aborts from dosing. Imagine this sloppyness in the doser could have cause excess pushing of powder out the cracks in the temperature break…as I did not see a big pile of powder come out the chamber walls after the swap.
However, the burring appears to be still bad in Default settings versus Legacy and we have had random “print stops” halfway through without any “aborts or errors”…just stops like “print complete”. This happened after updating firmware last night in which they are looking into now. I have another thread on this.
I am about to roll back firmware to continue the testing.
I am also still getting major bulges in around the temperature break level… but as everyone stated this seems to be unavoidable for the most part or at least very hard to control between chambers due to the temperature break not being very tight tolerance along the chamber walls from chamber to chamber… as many have opted to just not put parts anywhere below the temperature break. Tempted to buy a new chamber to see if they are much improved over my original three… Mine have not been used very hard but they are over a year old.