Yeah- I get that you, like nearly everyone else who has never designed, manufactured, and distributed a product before- expect that everything you buy perform perfectly without issue.
The recent troubles Formlabs has been having are all of a kind. They can be traced to bad assembly- parts not meeting the correct specification- and other forms of THEIR suppliers not delivering what THEY promised.
When you have something made in China, for example, and the Chinese manufacturer runs out of a certain size screw… but has an order to fill…and so substitutes a screw that is too long… or fails to train a new assembly technician who over tightens the resin sensor screws on 100 units… or, who knows, perhaps they just bought a new air powered screw driver that had too much torque? … and you don’t find out about the issue until those 100 units have been bought and shipped and are in operation… and even then, it wasn’t ALL the units you sold- just 100 that were randomly distributed throughout the world… And it takes you several months just to narrow down what the actual cause is… at first you think the user is doing something wrong…until you get enough feedback to to see that your advice isn’t making the problem go away… but then what? is it a shipment of bad sensors from the sensor manufacturer? Is the problem traceable to a single container that maybe had something happen to it enroute? and when you finally figure out that its the screws holding a good sensor in too tight… and ask users to retighten them with less force… well-that’s certainly embarrassing.
And now- does your logistics chain capture enough information to track the problem down to the specific worker or tool that is causing it? can you determine every unit that worker or tool touched to rectify it in stock before any more bad units ship?
And how much is all of this costing you?
Trust me… if you think these pesky little issues affecting your printer are frustrating for You- you have NO conception how frustrating they are for the folks who are making them.
Having developed products for overseas production- in countries where they won’t even TELL you when something is going wrong for fear of losing face, I have greater sympathy and understanding for what a delicate juggling act it is to get anything built reliably to spec.
I too have worked with lots of very high end SLA and sintering systems, and I can testify that they are far LESS reliable in direct proportion to how much more they cost.
My service bureaus generally shield me from how often their printers fail, leak, misprint, or have issues… but their services certainly factor it into the price.
Formlabs has shown every intention of making good with their promises… to the point of repairing or even replacing machines that are performing sub-nominally.
Complaining is to be expected… but given what we are all trying to do with these machines, we should all have some level of compassion for the fact that THEY are just as frustrated with their suppliers.
They look at all the unfullfilled orders for the LT tanks- or Strong Resin and Know that COULD be money in their pockets if only their suppliers could deliver as promised.
So, really- they KNOW your pain far better than you do and are working to solve the issues. ( or go bankrupt trying to )
And I say that as a new Form2 owner who’s printer never worked properly from day one, and after months of frustration had to return it for replacement.
