I thought I would share my experience with Form 1 community.
I received my first Form 1 printer in late July. After conducting a few initial prints I unplugged the printer. After plugging the printer back in and pressing the power button I smelled something burning I opened the cover of the printer and saw smoke filling up under the resin tray. I quickly unplugged the printer and contacted FormLabs. After returning the printer FormLabs found an electrical issue with the printer and shipped me another printer in a few days. Unfortunately the replacement printer has not been without issues.
Upon opening the box I noticed a cosmetic problem with the cover of the printer. I wasn’t particular concerned about it but it did make me wonder if QC thought it was acceptable. (Picture attached)
Next while I was filling the tray with resin I noticed there was a crack in the resin tray. Thankfully it hasn’t leaked the resin out of the tray but it does concern me that over time the crack could propagate and eventually cause the tray to fail. (picture attached)
I have done several prints on the replacement Form1 and results have been mixed. One thing that I noticed while printing which is not directly related to the print quality is that the cover on the printer does not align properly with the cover sensor. When the printer cover is closed I have to out push the door to one side or the printer believes the cover is still open (picture attached).
As for the print quality I have noticed to issues. One is trailing roughness on one side of all the models I have printed (picture attached). Second I have had thin layers of resin cured along parts of the models (picture attached).
I would be interested to know any others have seen these kind of quality issues with either the printer itself or the models it prints.
I replied to the email chain that was started when the initial Form 1 printer smoked it self. There was no response to that email. I have considered opening another ticket but since other ticket doesn’t seem to be closed and is related I thought I would reply to the current ticket.
Wow. Very disappointing. I have a similar issue with asking a question. I finally did get a response yesterday from an inquiry submitted on the 22nd, but now am waiting for follow up answers to my questions.
Yeah it is disappointing. I’m starting to wonder if I should write this off as a $2700 experiment gone bad. After my experience with the first printer I have concerns about leaving the Form 1 printing while I’m not in the room or even leaving it plugged in.
I have spent a lot of time and money trying to get the Form 1 to reach the capabilities presented in the Kickstarter pitch. At this point I’m not sure that it will ever get there and I’m not sure how much more I want to invest in the process.
Apologies on the delay in responding to your request, we are working our way through a massive inquiry queue. We are small, but our support team is expanding on Monday and so our response times will be improving throughout the next few weeks.
The failure mode you experienced with your first unit was the first time we have ever seen something of this nature occurring and we have followed up with our manufacturer to ensure that it does not happen again.
I am reviewing your documentation now and will followup with a response shortly. It is an internal priority to make sure customers with a printer in hand are taken care of and we will not be satisfied until you are printing successfully.
Problems happen which any first release of a product and the most important thing is that Form Labs is taking care of their customers and they care about the final product. I am overall happy with my Form1, however the quality of the prints is still not up there with other similar printers. Hopefully they are working on improving the print quality of the prints via software and firmware updates.
I’ve been pretty happy (or lucky) with support. The answers to my questions have always been prompt and helpful.
I’ve had unevent experience with the printer. Sometimes the prints are simply gorgeous. Sometimes the prints have weird gaps for no obvious reason (don’t correlate with a red area, same model prints fine on Makerbot2). Sometimes on a perfectly reasonable looking model there’s no print at all, just a blob, for reasons I have yet to figure out. It took me a while to get comfortable with the Makerbot2, but I got to the point that I could get a good print 95% of the time. I’m a long ways from that on the Form1. But it’s been an interesting experience.
Have you all seen the solution for Uncured patches that occur from complex geomety? Travis Rogers posted this, and it cleared up the problems I was having with stairstepping and missing patches.
"Travis Rogers
Hi all,
I was getting similar results in my first couple prints with strange folds and patches missing. I found a solution that gave me a clean print which you can read about here: http://support.formlabs.com/entries/24016846-Uncured-patches-and-pe…. For my models it seems to have been geometry related and I was able to solve the issue using MeshLab which you can dl for Mac or PC here: http://meshlab.sourceforge.net."
