Replacement Fuse 1 not working - PART 2

[LEADNAV]

This is a follow up report on all the issues we’ve had with Formlabs and the Fuse 1 system as a whole. You can go read them all and particularly the FUSE 1 IS DEAD thread before this but essentially…we are still down without a Formlabs system that will work.

After all the issues we had and the last Fuse 1, Sift and chamber being faulty, in which we were told is extremely rare and never happens, we were finally “allowed” to pay another $12k to get a Fuse 1+ 30 as a replacement to the faulty Fuse 1 we’ve been dealing with.

It arrived last week and it has not run anything as it is showing the same problems. I assumed this was to do with the original two chambers we had getting screwed up when the first Fuse 1 cooked itself after the December Firmware update but in the past week, I have swapped gaskets with no luck and last night I fully disassembled the Chamber bed on one unit and did maintenance on the fiber gasket and metal mesh tube buffer around the edges till I thought I had a pretty good mechanically operating chamber. Ran another print and the same failures with cracking along the edge of chamber in the initial powder prime and preheating.

NOTE: These two $3500 (each) chambers I’m fully dissembling (they sent me the service manual for them too) have less than two dozen print jobs on them…and here I am pulling them apart to troubleshoot them.

They are sending an entirely new chamber to cancel that out but as of this morning and my multiple photos and videos of the failures…they are now also sending me a “dozer assembly and expecting me to fully disassemble the brand new Fuse 1+ to replace this dozer as a possible issue”…

I am a little lost for words at the moment and extremely irritated as if they truly think this is now a dozer issue on a second brand new machine…well then I guess I am unlucky as this supposedly “never happens”. I’m also tired of just being expected to install new parts myself to get this new unit running.

I am more irritated that no one at Formlabs can finally get me a running system as I was sold on full support in keeping this thing going and not yet to have a single voice call, zoom call or even the in person service I was expected to receive.

I know additive is a new thing…new companies…but this is not how you survive in the manufacturing world. If this was any of our CNC machine companies handling business this way…they would be done. Our friends in the manufacturing and sales markets are in shock at our experiences so far and the handling of this situation. I did not plan on getting qualified as a full service and repair rep for Formlabs when investing in this system…I already wear enough hats.

If I did not have this system running successfully for a few months prior to their firmware update, I wouldn’t even believe this system actually works and would have given up on it entirely. I’m about at that point, as I am getting past the point where any return on investment would/will be possible as a viable business option for production parts.

Go ahead and look at what they are expecting me to do…to this brand new replacement $30k printer I just received last week and dropped another $12k on over the first lemon…and tell me what you think…

Service manual
Replacing Dozer assembly

Here is what is still happening and failing prints

Scraped away the powder to show where the cracks are forming over the chamber wall. I still think this is a heating issue in the chamber walls translating up through the powder and cracking it… but it seems were all guessing at this point.

[Phil.O]

Hi LEADNAV,

Thank you for sharing these details with us, and we apologize for your experience. I went ahead to inform the relevant parties and pointed them to this thread - below is the information I am able to share on what we are able to do on our end:

Our support team is actively working with you to resolve this and we are exploring all options.

Specifically, we provide our users with options to solve issues they encounter; providing spare parts and SOPs to install those parts is one of the options we offer to solve the issue as quickly as possible. We understand this is not ideal for every situation; we are scheduling a time to go on site and complete the repair on your printer.

[LEADNAV]

Here is the best video representation highlighting what is going on repeatably. This video is one of two I filmed yesterday with the same pattern happening on both chambers one after the other.

Second Chamber Run - Video

0:00-11:15 You see layers being laid down perfectly on Priming/Preprint
14:00-14:45 You can hear me describing what I think I see is three individual roller marks in surface (never noticed before but now you have me questioning the machine itself with the dozer suggestions)
18:45 You see the first crack show up out of nowhere on the right side as the printer reaches temp (under the Abort Print popup)
18:46 At the same time you can see cracking forming on left side developing from printer reaching temp. This is happening with no roller action. (To me…it’s almost like the bed is raising up slightly)
18:55-19:07 Before any roller action, Both cracks on either side grow larger JUST BEFORE the first preheat roller action which then makes them both significantly worse
18:59 The next roller action plows through somewhat eliminating the cracks but stacks powder up on the lower edge of chamber
21:00- The next roller pass totally plows through the powder causing catastrophic failure and the popup

Both chambers do this as here is the other chamber run yesterday just prior to this.

First Chamber Run - Video

Watching the first video again, it is almost like the bed on both chambers is raising slightly during preheating to cause cracks along chamber edges and/or the powder is raising like a loaf of bread…to then cause the roller to smash through on its next 3 layers.

If this is in fact a brand-new upgraded printer issue, then we are not only dealing with and troubleshooting two fried chambers from the last faulty printer baking itself after firmware release, but we are also dealing with a second faulty out of the box printer.

At this point I’m not ripping this new printer apart if that is the next suggestion to replace the dozer. You all are going to have to provide me a unit that functions.

[leonhart88]

Just curious but has anyone at formlabs been able to actually print your parts on their machines in house? I feel like that’s the very first thing they should do to reproduce your issues

[LEADNAV]

Leon

Yea…I mean we’re way past that point if you’ve been following along.

We’ve printed at this point around 1000 units in dozens of full chambers perfectly fine prior to the machine frying itself from the last firmware update. They literally sent us a new machine and if you’d actually watch the videos in this thread…it is failing in the priming and preheating stages.

Nothing to do with the print job. It’s not even getting to the print stage.

In fact these videos are of us trying to print “their XY calibration test print”.

At the moment, they are assuming this is a bad dozer from factory on this second machine.

[leonhart88]

Oh I’ve been following lol.

My question was more whether or not they’ve even been able to replicate all these issues on the same parts given there were some weird firmware update bugs and stuff.

I can’t imagine that you’ve been so unlucky on your machine and replacement parts…so curious if FL has even been able to print your parts successfully with the new FW and stuff or if they also have issues.

[LEADNAV]

Oh, Yes… I’ve been questioning in my mind, whether anybody but me is actually printing Nylon 12 GF on a consistent basis…whether it be out in the real world or even in testing at Formlabs themselves.

I was just thinking today if I should roll this brand new Fuse 1+ 30 watt replacement unit back to the old firmware just to see if there’s any difference…but I keep telling myself that there is no way that Formlabs would have released a firmware update without testing it heavily on all material types…right…? Haha

I was wandering this however on these new XY calibration prints they released. As you cannot slice the file yourself. It is preset per printer and per the material type you set. I was kind of wandering if there is anyway their XY test file would not actually run Nylon 12 GF… but surely they tested this all heavily! (again laughing it all off at this point)

They are now pretty sure it’s a dozer issue on this new printer so that would be another faulty printer. Supposedly someone is actually coming on scene but have not heard when yet so hopefully we will see what happens.

[leonhart88]

I would really push them to print your parts on their machines in the same material if you haven’t already and have them prove that they can repeatability print those parts without issue on several machines.

If they see the same problem in house it’ll be so much faster for them to troubleshoot, otherwise they’re kind of shooting in the dark to some degree with all the replacement parts.

[LEADNAV]

Status Update

Coming up on over a month since our system has been down. Back and fourth whether I believe a Formlabs rep will ever show up as discussed next week but here is the latest on my own troubleshooting.

Just spent the past 48 hours doing a total clean out of both the Fuse 1+ and the Sift of all old powder. Full blowout and wipe down so that I would be practically starting from scratch on clean machines.

I also rolled back the Firmware on both the Fuse 1+ and Preform to what was working before which was 1.15.6 and 3.28.0 just to cancel that out.

Total clean out and wipe of both old chambers.(Hopefully receiving a new one to try this Tuesday)

Put one new jug of Nylon 12 GF into the hopper from the new shipment I just received. (More on that below)

Running a single row chamber job of my parts and I am seeing the same pattern.

Lays down powder perfect on the Prime then when chamber hits temp the sides start to crack and I’m seeing flakes and chunks appear out of nowhere.

So, rolling back the firmware and starting from scratch we are only left with a few possibilities

• Chambers heating elements are not functioning properly - Possibly but strange they both went out. Will be able to verify this with the new Chamber coming
• Second printer is also faulty - Seems unlikely that this printer is faulty in the same exact way as the original Fuse 1
• Multiple bad batches of Nylon 12 GF over the past few months - This one is interesting…

So the reps brought up again off my videos that the powder may be the cause. This is the second time I’ve heard of possibilities in Formlabs “mixing up labels on their jugs”. Over the summer I heard of some bad batches of Nylon 12 GF and recalls and the same thing of possibly mixed up labels on the jugs of different material.

So this made me take a look at it closer and I realized the last XY calibration test print I was lucky to successfully print amongst dozens of fails…looks a little off to me compared to my other Nylon 12 GF prints.

You tell me. These were both one of few prints I was able to successfully get to print without failure on this new Fuse 1+ over the past few weeks.

Note that I have been running all these tests from the last shipment I ordered of Nylon 12 GF before December. 3 Cases / 6 Jugs. I have run these tests of this shipment as 70% refresh tests through the sift and after doing hopper clean outs with 100% tests straight from the jug. I actually went and grabbed these cases and jugs out of my trash to have on hand to hopefully track for issues.

Nylon 12 GF is all I have and the only thing I’ve ever used so not sure about the consistency in the other materials and or known issues but to me…as I cycled these jugs, one of these does not look like the other… (the cup is a test pull straight from the hopper that Formlabs requested next to the last XY print that looks different)

Hence me spending the past 48 hours totally cleaning out both the Fuse 1 and the Sift while throwing another 3-4 jugs worth of powder into the trash, doing all the above and adding a brand new shipment into the hopper…

Felt lucky…but nope. Seeing the exact same patterns in trying to print.

After we cancel out the Chamber on Tuesday… only thing I could imagine would be

• Multiple bad batches of Nylon 12 GF and in this case I’d hope Formlabs could tighten up their own material portfolio and quality control. At least avoiding this known issue of mixing up jug labels.

• If that is not the case then this is another faulty printer with heating and/or dozer issues

Both these at a minimum being Nylon 12 GF issues and me being the only one out here actually running Nylon 12 GF having these issues. Otherwise, I’d still love to hear from anyone else in the world running Nylon 12 GF constantly and successfully to prove me wrong.

[LEADNAV]

More on the possible powder issues…

After that print with a fresh Nylon 12 GF jug I looked in the hopper and I’ve never seen this before

It’s like the surface powder had a heat or air reaction and turned black…?

Very strange with nothing to do with any changes in humidity or room temps being the cause

I’m pretty sure there are some major issues going on with the latest batches of Nylon 12 GF as the root cause…

Believe Formlabs better check in with their materials manufacturer

[LEADNAV]

Just an update… after having a Formlabs rep finally fly in to take a look a few weeks ago… we are still troubleshooting.

To fix the new issues starting in December, we had to drop the chamber temp all the way down to -2.0c to -1.5c now that Formlabs “fixed” the chamber temp adjustments with the December firmware. Running default or anything higher was frying out the machine and powder.

The new Fuse is finally printing again but now we’re back to being able to only print 100%-70% fresh Nylon 12 GF.

If you followed my initial complaints last year “Nylon 12 GF cannot be printed under 70% refresh”…we are now back to that stage. Its like Deja Vu…

After dealing with that for a few months last summer, Formlabs provided us with a custom PreForm Beta that magically fixed the issue and allowed us to print down to at least the top end of what they advertise, 50% refresh. This however, I assume is what fried the machine after the December Fuse update conflict and started all these new issues.

Now that I bring this up, they are saying that the PreForm beta they supplied will no longer work and still no answers on what in fact that PreForm custom beta did to fix it?

Seems to be a “push/pull” on chamber temp and until Formlabs proves otherwise, I’d say they cannot truly advertise Nylon 12 GF as being a material that can print successfully under a 70% refresh rate. They advertise 30-50% and that is false advertising. 30%-40% even being mentioned is laughable as 50% is unrealistic from what I’m seeing on two different machines.

The Fuse 1+ fights it a little harder, with its increased speed but it still fails. The surface armor starts to curl and takes out the bed

Here is a better shot of the surface armor cracking before taking out the bed

So now we are stuck with an extremely high refresh rate on a material that already costs $710 for two jugs and that we are literally dumping an overflow of sifted powder out of the Sift and throwing it into the trash.

Again, I’d love to be proven otherwise but right now its safe to say that you will need to factor in 70%+ refresh on the costs of running Nylon 12 GF and from what I’m hearing the Nylon 11 CF and Nitrogen is even a bit more “finicky” combined with the rougher texture we don’t see many realistic options in materials for production running parts by Formlabs.

Formlabs support has been great at trying to help with support and replacement parts…material… but in the end I think this is a big limitation in the machine and material itself that needs to be addressed. They need to at least advertise a realistic expectation in the material refresh as I am hearing these same complaints from several people.

If you are looking to do production runs this puts it over the edge of being profitable…if doing prototyping it may not matter to you.

[LOCjon]

Hi @LEADNAV - is there any update on this situation now? Curious as we are experiencing serious downtime on our Fuse 1 and still do not have a solution after circles of support and confusion, which has now resulted in us using 100% fresh PA12 with a -3 degrees temp offset and still with failed parts. Plus, we were looking to upgrade to the Fuse 1+ to go towards PA11 … Very keen to hear more!

[LEADNAV]

After a year, with both the Fuse 1 and Fuse 1+ running Nylon 12 GF here was our final conclusion posted last week.

https://forum.formlabs.com/t/fuse-1-down-shes-dead-updated/35428/11

70+ refresh rates required for Nylon 12 GF and as you experienced plan to replace a lot of heat bulbs and optical cassettes regularly. Keep the bulbs clean and scrub them regularly with the recommended cleaner n pads same as you would the optical cassette.

Also, once you get it running consistently DON’T EVER UPDATE FIRMWARE unless absolutely needed. As you can find in another of our threads, this all started when a firmware release killed our original Fuse 1 by “overcooking it” when they finally made the offset chamber temp setting “work”.

Right now we are running the BETA they developed for us and put in the new PreForm for Nylon 12 GF. All seems to be working at a 70% refresh with that beta.

We also only run half chambers to be easier on the heater bulbs and optical cassette and the chamber itself and to cut down on our loses when a chamber does fail.

Big take away is that Formlabs seems to be trying to be competitive in their refresh rate advertisements…which are no where near possible or at least consistent in production running parts. Try 70% refresh rates but no idea outside of Nylon 12 GF.

Also after all this we have no desire to try Carbon Fiber or try to use Nitrogen as we have heard that adds another variable in consistency and issues from folks who are attempting it.

Like you said Support has been great sending us free powder and replacement parts but this company needs to start fixing the issues. Like you said it’s our “time” in trying to run this system we have lost the most on and the majority of our discoveries in making this system work has been from constant hounding on this forum to finally get someone at Formlabs to acknowledge the issue and offer a beta to fix it. Not to mention the hundred emails back and fourth to different reps to “prove/convince” there was in fact an issue with their system. It got old hearing back that “plenty of people are running this system for production in Nylon 12 GF successfully”…but them never telling us who these people were and/or hearing from a single person running Nylon 12 GF in the real world while finally hearing from dozens of folks instead having similar issues.

For over a year I’m confident that no one at Formlabs actually did consistent testing with their own systems and materials. They say that changed though shortly after the release of the Fuse 1+ with a new testing facility/operation so we will see… but they need a team running machines 24/7 with each material type to discover all these issues on their own as we have now heard from dozens of folks reaching out to us privately about similar experiences.

I will end with…this system and capability is GREAT. The parts we do produce are absolutely amazing. The machine and the Sift are all well thought out so congrats to the team who designed it.

However, I’m assuming Formlabs is having trouble scaling and putting it all together…with consistent testing and updates. In my experiences in things like this, I assume they have a hardware team doing great at the design, a software team and a material team…but they are lacking in the team of operators putting that all together and consistently running all three together to discover these issues. Instead I feel that “we the consumers” are mainly filling that role and not getting paid to do so other in free material and parts when they fail.

Regardless the cost of materials would have to come down greatly to make up for the falsely advertised refresh rates and the now anticipated failures to make this a mainstream production capability otherwise price per part is way too high. This unfortunately won’t be enough to bring that down and the cost of material could stay the same, if the production running of this machine is made more stable as the bigger lose is in the cost of labor to discover these failed prints/jobs and to reset the machine for the next attempt.

This system is almost there….n hoping they can eventually get it together.

[Andreasemilsson]

How are you hanging in with the Fuse1+?

We are experiencing orange peel from out of nowhere on the Fuse1+. No recent updates or anything. Support is on it but not gotten it fixed yet. Even tried 70% refreshrate but no go. Usually we run at 50% without issues on both Fuse 1 and Fuse 1+.

[LEADNAV]

I honestly have not been running it much these past few months. Because of the cost to maintain and cost of powder at the 70%+ refresh rates needed with Nylon 12 GF, to have parts that are not brittle for end use (if it could even print under 70%)…this system has a very niche use case in production parts. The end customer has to be willing or have the market to charge top dollar. It really puts that narrow window of going injection molding per quantity cap… “very narrow”.

Luckily I have a few clients with high end products and packages, where a part at that cost is acceptable and/or it is fine for selling my own products in house, without additional wholesale prices needed.

You add the cost of the system and the amount of parts that need regulary replaced…without running it 24/7 you start to wander what your actual run costs are…

Anyway, enough about that (just making sure people outside of us are aware of that before jumping on this system)

Orange peel? What is it doing exactly? Like on the surface of the parts?

I have been running the Beta PreForm setting for Nylon 12 GF so unless they are doing changes on their end to that Beta that effect the “slice” or handling outside the software, which I am assuming they could be doing as the whole system is connecting to them through the internet…

Otherwise, I would say something went out or faulty on the machine with what you are saying without a Firmware update and no changes in software.

If it is on the surface of the parts I would assume that would be laser related unless temp is off which then I would assume the print overall would fail from all the other issues we have seen in the past.

I am actually about to fire up the system for a new client…so fingers crossed no “Gremlins” appeared since I last ran it, but will let you know.

[Andreasemilsson]

Orange peel is on the surface yeah. Looks kind of like elefant skin or artefacts depending on who you are talking to at Formlabs. Now they request that we try with all fresh powder. This really is starting to annoy us as we can´t rely on the Fuse 1+ for production. Really dissatisfying.

[jdubose]

@Andreasemilsson Can you take a picture of the peel? We print in Nylon 12 but we’ve probably experienced every possible failure. Most of the failures were attributed to a defective printer that we got right out of the box, however, it took 3 months of going back and forth with FL before they agreed to replace it with a new machine. Then BAM!! we got good reliable prints from then on.

According to FL engineering, they think the laser was putting out too much juice, but we also got those weird surfaces on the sides of prints, odd dimensions of parts in different orientations and regular print failures. I have a feeling that we’re not the only ones that had a bad laser unit.

We had seen ghosted artifacts/shifted layers in a specific heights of the build chamber which turned out that there were a few loose screws in the chamber, which the rep came out, Loctite and retorqued them. Fixed that.

[Victor_J_ST]

We are also currently printing Nylon 12GF and this problem you are having was basically the same as what I was experiencing two months ago, such that the powder bed tearing seems to be related to high ambient temperatures. Initially the Formlabs staff suggested that I could lower the print bed target temperature by 1 degree Celsius and the powder bed tearing problem seemed to be improved, but there would be a little bit of a strange problem with the print quality. How has this problem been solved since then, we seem to have done a lot of things such as improving the cooling of the whole room, increasing the refresh rate to 50% ratio, switching to the Beta print settings of the new Perform software, cleaning all the powder inside the molding room between each print, making sure to clean the IR CONE before each print

[Andreasemilsson]

This particular image is of orange peel on the inside of a part. Usually it is on the outside aswell.

We have raised the bedtemp with increments of 0.5 degrees as per recommendations from Formlabs and now we see a huge improvement wich is really nice. In total we have raised the bedtemp 2 degrees.

[Andreasemilsson]

Yeah we had to move our entire fleet of printers out of our printerroom as the heat triggered the softcap in the printers wich is a 40degrees celsius.

We started with just moving one printer out. after a few weeks of running it´s laser died so that stood still for about a month before tech got here and replaced it.

Then we decided to move all three Fuse printers out into a more open area. All three are now running as intended, altho we don´t feel we can rely on the fuse1+ 100% yet. We still need to run some more testprints to make sure it works properly with all our product we manufacture.

Regarding the buildchambers, we got 6 of them right now and during the last year one of them had to be replaced. It died completly. I have organized a serviceprotocol for the buildchambers aswell as the printers so that i know the hours of print time on each chamber, when they need maintenance etc. I do those myself.