So I recently printed a part on the Form 3 in Durable resin which took up most of the Z-axis build volume. The Form 3 told me the print would take ~12 hours, which seemed reasonable according to Form 2 standards.
The print ended up taking around 20 hours instead.
I’ve heard reports of this floating around the forums. It seems like the firmware is wildly underestimating the time required for the new peeling mechanism (I also notice that it has some REALLY long delays).
I’m assuming this will get better with FW updates, but can anyone shed some light on this?
I have a Form 3 also but use high temp resin and castable wax resin.
I noticed that printing at both 50um and 25um give bad estimates.
I’m often within the vicinity of the printer while it prints and sometimes i would notice the build platform elevate and stay elevated for a min or two while the wiper does its thing, for whatever reason it may be(dust, resin particles, mixing for consistent temp in the whole tank, idk…). I hypothesized that the print time estimator doesn’t take that into account. Another weakly supported thing I think I may have noticed is that the more layers you have, the worse the estimate. I think I noticed shorter jobs having less “extra” time than longer jobs having way more “extra” print time.
I know its all guesswork but hope this info helps
@DKirch This is a real problem! Many of us rely on the print time estimates to bill our customers and schedule prints, and if it’s way off, then we’ll end up losing money, customers or both! Please bring that to the attention of the software team! By the way, it is still not possible to calculate the print time in PreForm, which is also a no-no when it comes to an efficient workflow!
I’m having this same issue with draft resin: 6-8 hour estimated prints taking well over 13-15 hours. This means I cannot accurately figure out a production schedule/ when I need to be in the shop to change out for the next print. Thus wasting hours of time guessing or with the printer sitting idle…
Heard from a friend who also has a Form 3 that they had a relatively flat part that was grossly underestimated as well - so it’s not related to layer height & peel cycles as I originally though.
Thank goodness I still have my Form 2 as a backup machine.
We have the same issue here. We use the Form3 and the estimate time in PreForm does not match with the real print time,
From experience, you can assume that the real print time is double as the calculated time. However, for now it is difficult to schedule prints. This is a real problem!
Having the same issue over here. Our Form 3 gives us incorrect estimates on printing times and we can’t actually see the estimated time in PreForm. I would like to see if further updated fix this problem because Our team really like this machine and would like to get three more.
The estimated print time seems to be better or more accurate with the newest firmware/software…although my most recent prints were in standard resins and I’m unsure whether the engineering resin time estimates are still off.
The Form 3’s are still much slower than the Form 2 though unfortunately.
I personally found that restarting the printer every couple of days helps with the time estimate.
as I printed one job after the other I noticed the time slips and delays- but restarting it helped it get back on track.
That’s really odd - I’ll have to take a look at that. So far with standard resins and the time estimate on the machine, it’s been accurate to what Dashboard tells me. Preform estimates are still off though.
A 5hr print (what PreForm said) that I started yesterday is only at 56% complete, and it’s been over 17hrs!
I’m going to restart the machine as soon as this is done, and try another print to see if the time is more accurate…
Thanks for the suggestion.
Having same problems here… estimate 17 hours… now already more than 30 hours, still remain another 2 hours
that show on the printer… but seem it will take much longer than it show.
I am having the same problem but it seen that it started after I upgrade the software to 3.7.1 which the adaptive layer option. I am running a job that estimate a run time of 5 hour and it took 16.44 hours. 1185 layers, clear resin, 17.1 ml.
Yeah I think for the beta print settings and adaptive layers they haven’t done much to adjust the clock time accordingly. I’m on a large movie and will have to start doubling estimates after pretty much getting in trouble because the machine was waaayyyy off and pieces were late.
Gray resin, beta settings. 100um layer height. Estimated print time 2h45m. 4 HOURS LATER IT IS LESS THAN HALF WAY DONE, Still says 1h15m left. Has said around that for over an hour. WTF Form, some of us are working in an environment where we need to have a realistic time estimate. off by an hour or 1 is one thing. for a quick print to be at 2x the estimated time and still only half done… That’s not acceptable. (BTW why would a print like this take so long? I literally printed a 120% scale version of the same print, same settings, and it was done in 3 hours flat).
