I’ve had a Form 2 for some time but this question pertains my newly purchased Form 3. I closely monitor my resin usage on both units. I set up my new Form 3 inserted a new 1 Ltr Cartridge and began work. I used a total of 522 ml to date. I tried to make another printer that as only 3.3 ml and was warned I didn’t have enough resin in the cartridge, Where did the other 478 ml go? Does the tank hold that much? I checked and the cartridge and it is bone dry!
I might also add that on the printer and in my Dashboard it shows that Cartridge as having 500 ml left.
I don’t know the exact measurement, but the tanks do hold quite a bit of resin, nearly half the cartridge. You should still be able to print off that for a while without refilling it, probably another 250ml at least before you want to throw another cart in there.
You should weight your parts, because the software is lying about the consumption.Form 3 is consuming 36% more material than the form 2. Here is the proof.
I had suspected this based on my usage recently but hadn’t actually measured it. This is a right kick in the teeth and I’d like to know from formlabs why this is.
Hi @Mario_Martinez,
My name is Jake Misra, I lead the Sustaining Engineering team here at Formlabs.
The mass difference you’re seeing between your parts is very unexpected. I have seen this issue arise with very small parts, before we made considerable improvements to fine features. The issues in the past were caused by erroneously curing additional material, so this mass discrepancy would punish parts with a high surface area to volume ratio.
For your issue, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Can you send me the form file or STL for your parts? I would like to replicate the issue at HQ. If you’d like, you can DM them to me rather than post them publicly.
Well actually the software calculates volume not weight - so given that cured resin is denser than 1g/ml (it sinks in water) the latest version of Preform might not as wrong as you think…
It looks like you’re running two different versions of Preform? - and I think the preform version you’re using for the Form2 is the one that’s certainly wrong in it’s volume calculation - since 68.57ml of cured resin absolutely weighs more than 68grams.
So your older version of Preform is overestimating your resin usage.
Your newer version of Preform might be giving you more accurate information - depending on what the density of the cured resin actually is.
I did a quick search for Formlabs technical data sheets and couldn’t find a density number, but your result would a density of 1.26g/ml (93 / 73.67)
