I have not honestly been running the system 24/7…with all the issues and the cost of powder being extremely high for production parts… so I cannot truly tell. However, I do notice a alot of Laruolactam build up on my filters for the little I use it and I was just thinking the other day that they should be replaced.
I imagine if you run this system 24/7 you would be replacing filters at least once a month or maybe even more.
I run Nylon 12 GF at 70% refresh…because you have too… otherwise your failure rate would be too high and the parts would be brittle.
I am on the fence about switching to Nylon 12… all these issues seem to be outside of the core Nylon 12. Formlab reps themselves have been pretty open about the issues with Nylon 12 GF and ALL the updates for improvement and speed increases, if you noticed, are only for Nylon 12.
I need the extra heat resistance and rigitity of the GF for our application…but at the moment it is not very sustainable for production running parts.
Formlabs should be honest and say…they are a “one” material printer with Nylon 12 for possible production parts. Because, all their “production materials” (Nylon 12 GF and CF) do not print dependable enough and/or are not cost efficient enough to ever be a “production level material”.
Everything outside of Nylon 12 is just a cool material that you “could” occasionally print with…in my opinion.
The one fix Formlabs could do… is try to lower powder prices greatly. This would make it possible for production parts and eliminate all the support needs. If a print fails or if I had to troubleshoot… we would not be out over $700 each chamber to dial things in on our own. I wouldn’t be hitting up Support and I would be more prone to “tinkering” on my own.
Unlike an FDM or Resin printer that you can stop the print if you see things going bad… here you are tossing hundreds of dollars in the trash per failure with additional post processing labor on top of that, to discover some of these issues.
It seems like they are trying to be a HP ink printer company but instead of charging way cheap for the printer…and getting you on the “ink” costs… they are trying to have it both ways.