We have been using the Formlabs Fuse 1+ 30W for a couple of months. Printing Nylon PA12 was not a problem. The prints were successful, some minor defects in the surface finish were seen but overall the prints were good.
We are a service provider in India and our goal was to target a less competitive market, which is Nylon PA 12 GF. There arent many service providers in Pune, India, that provide PA12 GF. Our experience of printing with this material in the formlabs printer has been a very challenging and costly.
We have had a failure rate of 70% so far. We have nitrogen supply to the printer, we are using a refresh rate of 50%.
We have uploaded all logs on formlabs support. We updated the software, we have made sure to use 100% virgin powder, we also vacuumed the whole printer. However, we are still facing this issue.
I have attached photos to show the failure. Any recommendations or suggestions would be appreciated.
We have tried printing with 100% fresh powder and we still had 2 failures. I am not sure why Formlabs is not fixing this issue with PA 12 GF.
Its a potential market and we have clients that we are exporting to, having such failures ends up being very costly for us.
I would not recommend running PA 12 GF on formlabs until they find a solution to this.
Nylon 12 GF prints fine and is stable at a 70% refresh rate…if you are willing to throw a lot of powder in the trash you won’t have any issues other than random printer glitches or a bad firmware release occasionally.
Do you use your sift to mix the powder? (Stupid question perhaps, but gotta ask)
Do you have your printer connected to a ups/line conditioner? (if not, i highly recommend it)
Nylon 12 GF is extremely sensitive to currentchanges, and a ups/lineconditioner helps with that.
Do you have any scratches on your coater? Any buildup on your flippers?
What is the humidity in the space you are running your printers? (Humidity should be kept as low as possible. You can read more on that at the formlabs website.
it is crucial that there is no build up what so ever on the coater, flippers or the lining that the coater runs on. The result can be scraps of burnt powder comes loose and disrupts the bed. Nylon 12GF is more prone to create buildup than Nylon 12.
Make sure the cogs in the back of the printhousing that drives the coater are free from buildup aswell. That would cause serious issues with a stuttering coater.
We run all our printers on 50% refresh rate, We have never ever run above or below that. Sure it took some time to dial that in, but now they all work flawless.
This is based on my own experience. I´ve been running two Fuse 1 for almost 2,5 years and one Fuse1+ for over a year. We had severe issues with the Fuse1+ initially but they are all solved right now. One was the birchbark wich was fixed by using a lineconditioner.
Reach out to Formlabs support incase you don´t solve the issues.
Looking at this… we had the same exact issue for over a year while troubleshooting with multiple Formlabs reps online, over the phone, via hundreds of emails and someone onsite…in which none of that resolved this.
The eventual fix, that we figured out on our own, was bumping up to a 70% refresh rate which eliminated everything you see in these photos.
Sucks to throw all that powder you can’t recycle in the trash… but that nearly eliminated all of the powder related issues like this one.
In fact we can tell when the printer will be successful by watching the powder build up, on the camera, along the back wall/roller path. If that powder looks fine the print will be good. If that powder has any clumps or a crumble look to it… it will fail.
I can tell by looking at your photos that it has that clumpy look to it. This will be an ultra fine stack of powder above a 70% refresh.
We also do 2-3 full Doser rotations, while vacuuming out that tray before each print job. This flushes out the bottom of the hopper where we beleive it was heated too much from the previous print job, being closer to the chamber. This helped reduce preheat and initial print issues. (Again more powder in the trash…but hey…it worked).
Thanks for your comment. To answer your questions:
Do you use your sift to mix the powder? (Stupid question perhaps, but gotta ask) - Yes, we use sift to collect and mix the powder.
Do you have your printer connected to a ups/line conditioner? (if not, i highly recommend it)
Nylon 12 GF is extremely sensitive to currentchanges, and a ups/lineconditioner helps with that.
We have connected the printer to a UPS with power backup. So the printer is working under stable power supply.
Do you have any scratches on your coater? Any buildup on your flippers?
We never checked this in PA12 as it worked fine. Since the errors in PA 12 GF, we have been vacuuming the flippers and also checking the coater for debris and scratches. That doesnt seem to be an issue.
What is the humidity in the space you are running your printers? (Humidity should be kept as low as possible. You can read more on that at the formlabs website.
The printer and sift are in a closed room with 24 degree celsius temperature and controlled humidity.
Are you running GF with or without nitrogen? We have been suggested to run GF without nitrogen to see if the build prints successfully.
Thanks for your comment. We have been in contact with formlabs for the past few weeks. We just ran a print yesterday with no Nitrogen and a 70% refresh rate. The print was successful, we are yet to remove the parts to check for wrapping or failure but at least the print was completed. We did try 70% refresh rate earlier and still had a print failure. I am not sure how not using nitrogen has helped but that is the only thing that has changed and we have had success.
We vacuumed the whole bed and the doser a couple of times, to make sure there isn’t any debris from the previous failure. We didn’t consider the powder heating up from previous prints. Definitely a useful tip.
Yea at 70% we have been running pretty successfully again minus the random firmware updates causing issues or other things like our heater bulbs having a very short life span, etc…
We got excited for Nylon CF and the whole Nitrogen system when it came out but quickly turned away from it after some folks down the road tried it and we’re not having much luck.
When troubleshooting nylon 12 GF below 70%… we had thought and asked Formlabs if nitrogen would help this and they responded with a NO… nitrogen won’t help with Nylon 12 GF or refresh rates.
I have tried creeping it down to 65% refresh but again it definitely ups the failed prints and we have found our parts to be brittle under 70% so those two combined made it not worth it with the minor cost savings… but yes this all sucks because cost of material alone while dumping overflows of it in the trash makes this an extremely niche option for manufacturing over injection molding.
We did however ask Formlabs about bulk ordering and it seems if we committed to 9 cases of nylon 12 GF…we would at least save a bit of that throwing away of powder… but still powder cost is outrageous in SLS.
Much much cheaper for aluminum and CNC or injection molding very quickly after running this system.
