Form 2: Fine tuning beyond the internal 5% mark

General Discussion
1

Hello everyone,

We have a Form 2 that recently splashed its internals with High-Temp V1 because the printed part stuck to the tank and the wiper kept on wiping for 2 hours or so before anyone noticed. We don’t want to invest in it anymore because it’s the second refurbished Form 2 (our third in total) and now we’re gonna move on to the Form 3.
Since Formlabs doesn’t have a buy-back-program or something similar, we’re gonna keep it, as of now. We also don’t want to pay 800€ for repair and replacement parts.

The galvo-cables on the circuit board on the front right corner were soaked in resin and I cleaned it up as best as I could but for some reason it set off the galvos themselves and after writing with the FL support, we figured to set the X/Y Fine Tuning to X: 105,5% and Y: 95,6%
(https://support.formlabs.com/s/article/Fine-Tuning-the-Form-2?language=en_US)

The careful reader might now have noticed, that the X-Scaling won’t be possible as the Form 2 doesn’t allow scaling greater than 5%.

Now my question for you (just for curiosities sake) :

Do you know a hack to scale the X/Y Fine Tuning by more than 5% considering sending it to the repair center won’t be an option and neither is pre-scaling each part by 0,5% in X-direction?

I’m looking forward to your ideas!

Best regards

2

The Glavos are driven by a D/A converter. At a guess, the scaling factor is being applied to the digital values before they’re written to the D/A. So the maximum range of adjustment you can get is constrained by the software implementation and there is no alternative method of “rescaling”.

Assuming you were really careful cleaning things, and you didn’t actually touch the galvos/mirrors, and assuming no resin made it as far as the galvo itself (vs. the cable), I’m struggling to understand how the error was introduced. If there’s a mechanical alignment component to the equation, you might just loosen up and retighten the galvo block and get things to shift slightly, and in so doing buy a little more margin…