Form 3 is dead

Yeah, their replacement part costs can be ridiculous. There’s no way that board is $1,200 to the user. I worked for a company that applied two 40% markups on parts, which is a crazy high profit margin. If FL is doing the same, that would mean that the board cost them $600. No way. They make thousands of these. I’d be very surprised if the motherboard cost them even $200.

I guess when you’re the only supplier of repair parts you can charge whatever you want.

Thank you. I’ll check it out. So far the info I’m reading about fixes for this isn’t reassuring. I’m getting very disappointed with FL service. Hard to feel like making any new “investments” with them if they can’t offer support for their equipment. Buying a entire new printer is not effective support.

Thank you again for sharing.

The resin overflow is the Form’s Achilles Heal. All the other ingenious engineering on these and overflow handling is nonexistent and results in disaster. We had two Form 3s die in this manner. After major leakage, even after thorough cleaning, they just never worked well again. At least the Form 2 had a little drip edge with a ledge that directed overflow away from electronics. That just doesn’t exist in the Form 3 and any spills will result in the machine pretty much ruined.

Our spills had a similar issue with the mainboard. Fortunately, these were still under warranty.

of course, the caveat here: Do not, under any circumstances, let the tanks leak! :smiley:
Tank handling is extremely critical.

I’m in the same boat as of yesterday. The printer isn’t turning on but the green LED on the motherboard lights up. The only solution from support was to buy a replacement for 1200€… so not a solution at all. Did anyone get somewhere with some kind of potential fix? Any help at this point is welcome.

Trying to diagnose the problem myself further, I took apart the motherboard and the little daughterboard that has the CPU on it, and there was resin in like every little crevice, and it seems like some resin had solidified on the pins where the daughterboard and motherboard make a connection. So I can’t say for sure why my printer stopped working in the first place, but that was probably the problem since I think the resin is insulating, preventing the connections from making electrical contact. I ended up getting the service to replace the printer with a refurbished one…

But yeah I think Formlabs could have done a better job of isolating the electronics from possible resin leaks.

Maybe an after market “drip tray” of some sort