My FL3 is taking forever on it’s last print. I have a feeling every layer is printing double. Laser moves twice before lifting platform. It’s a 15hour print that si already taking 20hours and it’s just halfway!
Any had similar experiences or knows what the problem is… I’m thinking of stopping the print but prints does look ok so a little in doubt…
so… help!!! 
I have now seen the same thing with my FL3. I printed the same exact parts last week which took 12 hours, yesterday they finished at 1 Day and 5 hours. Last night I started a different job at 10 PM with estimated complete in 9 hours, so this morning a 7AM it says 6 hours remain! I had my machine updated after the first print from a July update that I missed while I was on an extended trip. This is horrible.
A little more looking into this, mine prints then has a 10 second delay before the build plate lifts, then 45 seconds dwell then the cycle starts over…my my job with 1020 layers yet to go will take another 17 hours…
I’m also seeing this with a print I started last night – 880 layers at 50µm, it said it was supposed to take 8 hours, and here we are, 13 hours later, still on layer 417/880.
The build platform also goes up and stays there for about 45 seconds each time. I’ve emailed support, so let’s see what they have to say…
In an older thread a couple of other users said that after a re-boot things went back to normal, that’s my next thing to try. Let us know if support comes back with any news on this. Cheers.
My 8 hour print has now taken 10 hours, and is only 75% done…
I hope this bug gets figured out, as I don’t want to have to restart my printer before every print.
As another update, after 18 hours it was at 650/880 layers, it seemed to get slower and slower, so I cancelled it. (I timed one of the layers, it took over 5 minutes per layer).
Whatever problem it was, it got progressively worse, so I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have finished within 24 hours.
I restarted the machine and build from scratch, and it finished in the 8 hours it was supposed to.
I went ahead and am letting mine finish…its now been 1 day and 12 hours for 1480 layers. I guess I have too much patience. Its now only 20 layers and ___ minutes to go…
Well, I let my print finish. It took roughly 32 hours and although it came out okay I kind of regret that I did. I needed another copy of the same print so I did a reboot of the printer, checked the tank (felt okay (scraper) at the time) and started a new print. The print acted normally but half way I noticed the print was damaged. So I stopped the print and after cleaning I noticed my tank was ruined. It’s completely dried and cracked on the spot of my print. It was not even halfway it’s lifespan so it should have lasted a lot more prints and I know it was in good condition before the long print because I had done a visual and scraper check just before. This must have something to do with the extremely long print were the laser passed double for each layer. That parts really popped to get loose when the platform moved to the next layer
So next time i abort immediately.!!
I will also contact support and see what they have to say…
My experience and discussions with support point to a memory leak that causes this problem. As reported, rebooting the printer in between prints helps with this problem.
The F3 is generally slower than an F2 due to a slow wipe cycle. For Tough 2K, it prints a layer, raises a little, prints another layer, then does a wipe. The build platform pauses for 5-6 seconds before lowering to start the next set of layers. When the memory leak problem starts to show itself the pause increases up to 30-60 seconds per wipe. This results in extremely long print times.
The average layer time for the F2 is about 2 seconds including the wipe compared to 3 seconds for the F3. Currently, even when the F3 is working perfectly, this means the F3 will take 35-50% longer to complete a given print when compared to a F2.
Support finally got back to me as well, they gave me a recommendation to reboot the printer once a week, so I’ll set a reminder to do this until they fix the firmware bug, which they do know about.
ok, thanks for letting me know. I assume I will get the same feedback from support so I will start rebooting every week… Let’s hope they fix this soon because it’s weird enough that the printer hasn’t got a on/off switch (all though the reason from FL makes sense it just feels weird) but rebooting by unplugging it was not on my must have list when I bought the machine
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Hi folks,
As some of you posted above, there have been some issues in the firmware that gradually increase the time per layer and can be solved with a reboot. We have been finding and fixing the sources of these over the last several months and the latest firmware (1.7.7) should now resolve this issue. You should see the update available on your Form 3/3B, or you can manually download it here: https://support.formlabs.com/s/article/Firmware-Release-Notes