This. THIS is my favorite error. lol
can you use the valve from the old one? instead of having to cut the new one
I wouldn’t know how to remove that valve from a full resin cartridge without making a huge mess. So in the end, I just cut it open with a sharp knife.
It seems cartridge 4c-0000006bf649 is cursed. That’s the one that started off with a “valve stuck” error and after I cut open the valve with a sharp knife, things only went downhill from there.
Yesterday, it was still supposed to be at 517 mL:
Then I started a print (with a full tray) and within 4 minutes, so before heating finished and printing ever started, it already went down to 454 mL:
Then over night, throughout that print, it went to 140 mL:
And in the morning I could literally refresh every minute and see the Resin Level drop each time:
By now, the print has finished (at least that) and the cartridge is supposedly down to 124 mL:
If this is true, that would mean 393 mL of resin use counted for a 115 mL print (starting with a full tray).
And it took an hour longer than it should due to excessive “Sensing Resin”. The resulting object also has a few extremely visible compression lines.
In case anyone from Formlabs wants to check, I just (Dec 1st, 3PM CET) uploaded diagnostics for DiligentApe.
My impression is that this was all caused by the cartridge shipping with a bad valve, meaning bad QA in the Formlabs resin factory. Like this, I will probably get less than 500 mL of actual resin use out of the cartridge before the printer will lock me out, so I wonder if the cartridges affected by this QA hiccup should get a 50% rebate to compensate for the fact that they are only 50% usable.
Also, I typically print many small things where the resin inside the tank would be more than enough to finish the object. But sadly, Open Mode will disable heating and wiper and that makes Formlabs Clear V4 resin effectively unusable because it becomes a sticky pudding goo. But I think a great solution would be if Formlabs could release a firmware update that allows you to disable all “Sensing Resin” checks for prints where PreForm estimates less than 50 mL of resin use. That would resolve 95% of my problems with this printer. And also those nasty “Sensing Resin” layer lines.
Another great solution - but which will probably never come because it might reduce profitability - would be to just enable the wiper and heating in Open Mode. That would allow me to actually use the 500 mL of resin (equivalent to €80) that will be physically left inside this cartridge when the printer determines it to be too empty and locks me out.