As Victor stated, our experiences so far are similar.
We required Nylon 12 GF for our attempts at production parts and needed the added heat resistance. The amount of time we spent in the first year trying to trouble shoot this system and material on our own is unmeasurable. Took over 6 months for Formlabs to acknowledge the issue and start to put out Beta fixes. Even with all the free powder given to try to do so on our own…the time we wasted was “significant”…
We had planned on doing production runs on this system, which I have found is an extremely niche possibility due to the cost of the material and maintenance on the system these production parts must be priced at top dollar and from you…direct to consumer. There is not enough meat on the bone in the end to manufacture parts to outside parties for them to then make any profit or to be justified rather than going to injection molding. If you know someone who is making an assembly of parts for a product…and they are willing to pay you full price to get that component into their kit…then it may make sense.
I needed to kick this off as its own thread… but I had started the conversation here
https://forum.formlabs.com/t/replacement-fuse-1-not-working-part-2/35517/30
of asking anyone out there “If they are making any money with this system for manufacturing production parts to outside parties or at all?”
Got a lot of interesting use cases from different folks… with a lot of folks saying they just planned to “break even” on this system as a useful tool to have in house for prototyping etc… Also some others with unique in-house production of their own parts and a few doing “time share” for people to run their machine…
So I guess it depends if you have the money laying around to have this capability in house but I would be realistic in what you plan to do with it.
I will say…so far “We have figured out” how to keep the system running consitently while running Nylon 12 GF but it involved a year of trying to tell Formlabs there was an issue with it…and them finally providing a “Beta” for Nylon 12 GF that for some reason is still a “Beta” in PreForm and also us giving up on trying to run under a 70% refresh rate. We also stopped trying to do full chambers and stick to running half to 3/4 chambers at a time which we think is easier on the components with the higher powered Fuse1+.
I will NEVER be updating the firmware at this point… as it is currently working but I’m also worried at any moment they will tinker with something or remove the Beta…
We are also not running the system like we had planned 24/7… as again we found out due to all the above… this system is extremely niche in what production parts it is cost effective for.
If you are prototyping and make a living doing that then yea it is great.
So yes…our experience improved by being realistic in our expectations and by not running the machine as much as we originally hoped for Ha!
It is awesome…when its running consistent but the cost of material NEEDS to come down for any hope of manufacturing or you better have a part…that you can fit at least 100 units into a single chamber to make any money outside of direct to consumer.
Good luck