I’m having an issue using my rigid 10k on the form 3. The preheating can’t seem to get up to 34c. I tired 3 times and each time it’s still below even after 12+ hrs. It was close (33.8 out of 34c) at one point but few hours later it was at back at 29 c. Its been 3 days a support hasn’t replied and now its the weekend so probably wont hear for another 2 days. I need this working for my business. Anything I can try or bypass?
What’s the temperature of your room?
A way to help your printer out would be to insulate it, or to provide a little supporting heat. You could put the printer in a small box. Or you could put something like a heat pad – the kind used in reptile enclosures – under the printer. They only raise the temperature by a few degrees, so there’s no risk of cooking your printer.
Its 22c in the house. Should I really have to enclose it? Its only going up to 34c, first time I used the 10k, it got up to temp in a few hours(still a while) and then printed. Other resins seem to work well. Still no word from support…
If it’s 22c in your room you should be okay.
I imagine something with your printer’s heater must be defective. Either it isn’t heating effectively, or the temperature sensor is off.
My printer sometimes has difficulty reaching operating temperature, but the room its in, is often down to 8c. The printer can get up to 31c, but it can’t get to 34c in those conditions.
Sounds to me like it’s definitely worth contacting our support team at the link below so they can investigate. At first glance this sounds like it should be absolutely fine.
https://support.formlabs.com/s/contact-support?language=en_US
The latest firmware (1.8.3) puts a ‘Skip’ button on screen while the printer is heating.
I’ve emailed twice and its been a week, didn’t hear anything. Is there a number I can call?
Hmm I have the latest firmware and I don’t see that that skip button.
Sorry, I see it now. Maybe it needed a restart. Thanks for the input.
Actually, that button is not there for rigid 10k. It is for Grey V4 but not rigid 10k for some reason…
It could be that your heater is defective.
After a couple of months of use, the heater in the Form3 where I work went bad and pretty much stopped outputting.
Support had me remove the back of the printer and reseat the plug for the heater element. I work as an engineer and repair technician for subsea robots and told FormLabs as much, yet they refused to tell me the nominal resistance of the heater (they “don’t disclose technical information”) so I could test it with a multimeter to see if the reisstance was higher than it should be… I measured it anyway while I had the back open and calculated that it was only outputting about 8W! Way too low to do much of anything. I asked FormLabs to send a replacement heater as I could see the heater assembly was held in with 2 bolts and then had a plug for the heater and a plug for the fan, meaning replacement would be very simple. They refused to send a replacement part and we had to send the Form3 back to the distributor for replacement…
If your heater issue is hardware related, prepare for some down time while you convince support you do actually have a problem, wait for the decision about what to do, then wait for a replacement.
What was the ohms of the new heating element?
What was the ohms of the new heating element?
$1,300 to replace the heater. Good god.
Add a 100% markup, charge me a couple hundred for the part and I’ll fix it myself. $1300 is nearly half the price of the entire printer itself.
Looks like I’ll be barn-jobbing an enclosure or some other indirect ducting to get heat into this. I can design something from scratch for less than that.
Hi @Legrand,
Thank you for reaching out about this. The heater is not a user-replaceable part on the Form 3, which means that our only way to address a confirmed faulty heater would be a printer replacement. I recognize that this is not ideal given the cost of such a replacement out of warranty, and I appreciate your patience and understanding in the matter.
While I understand your company policy is likely in place to prevent some lawsuit, “not user replaceable” is not really applicable to me, and I imagine many others. Right to repair is a reasonable expectation. I work for a company that builds sensors that go onto rockets that go into outer space. There’s a teardown online (Formlabs Form 3 Teardown « bunnie's blog) that clearly shows that this assembly is a cable and a couple of screws. That plastic injection molded housing is $10 at max, the fan a couple dollars more and the heating element is probably around $10-15 at most. This can’t be more than two hours labor for an experienced employee (I’ve opened the housing up for tensioner issues using Formlabs provided docs in the past), and that’s being generous. Let’s be crazy and say it’s $150/ hour plus parts. $400-$500 would be reasonable. $1300 is highway robbery.
Hi Legrand,
We understand where you are coming from especially when factoring the cost of our current offered solution to the issue versus sourcing a fix on your own. We also understand that user-replaceable may not align with a group of our users in these types of contexts, and your point is definitely valid.
In terms of what we are able to offer as a solution within the scope of our company policy, this is our current solution in terms of addressing the heater and I understand this is not ideal as Jesse has mentioned, and do apologize for this as well.
We make sure to take feedback such as yours into consideration as we do want to have a wider range of parts we are able to offer in the future. While this may not be evident at this time, given the age of this thread, we encourage all our users to share their feedback to help this process along to help us improve the user experience in the long run.