Form 2 heater starts, but drops out during print

After a long search to find the non adherence issues, Formlabs support found that the logs of our Form 2 showed the heater dropping out after the print had started, causing prints on the edge of the build plate to print complete fine, but in the centre there are non adherence issues.

Without further investigation, Formlabs support told me that the heater was faulty, cannot be replaced, and due to warranty period being expired, the only options were to get a discount to upgrade to a form 3, or get a refurbished one.

With other users successfully repairing heater problems (Form 2 heater cable repair), we would like to investigate further before spending money.
Tomorrow I will bring in a multi meter to check for faulty cables, but in the mean time:
Is anyone able to give us an educated guess on why it starts, gets to reach temperature, so the print starts without error, and then drops out? I have not been able to find anything about this particular issue by other users. Could this be a firmware issue?

Impossible to be sure without investigating your specific unit, but one guess might be that the heater cable is getting nudged during the printing process (e.g. peel) breaking the connection.

But I wouldn’t expect a non-functional heater to cause non-adherence. After all, Open Mode doesn’t use the heater at all but prints still adhere.

Thanks for getting back, rkagerer.
I had considered that. Non adherence in the center, but adherence on the outside stays consistent during the print, no matter how high the print is. Following Formlabs support’s theory, this should change to non adherence over the whole platform over time, when the heater cools down.

We have also considered a problem with the laser. Our laser engraver needs to be a certain distance from the object it needs to engrave, and I can only imagine that the laser in the Form 2 also needs to be focussed on the resin for curing. The laser beam needs to travel further to the outside of the build plate, than to the center. Hypothetically, if due to some sort of problem, the focal distance of the laser would have changed, this could replicate this problem.
Any thoughts on that?