Print temperature is really critical for SLS devices, and any small difference can seriously affect print quality (e.g. IR SENSOR). Unless there is a very specific error code for this fault, then most of the problems will be in the optical system and temperature control part,
I heard that they are going to release a Bed Temperature Measurement Tool, which will allow you to select the print bed temperature more accurately!
Bed Temperature Measurement Tool is most probably a print were the printer prints 5 parts, each at a different temperature offset. Starting at -2°C and then the following offsets; -1°C, 0°C, +1°C, +2°C.
Formlabs uploaded directly to our printer about two months ago to investigate thermal problems.
After checking the logfiles it showed up some strange behavior. After that they decided to replace the printer for the second time (since January 2023).
Now, after six months having the third printer me is told that the logs aren’t showing strange behavior anymore, so I hope from now on I can rely on our printer.
Also thinking about adding temperature and humidity control, to see if this will effect print results in a positive way.
Maybe this should be its own thread, but I’m excited to finally see others in real life running this system chiming in here…forgive me for hijacking it but started the thread so here are some questions I have for you all.
I’m overall seeing “lots of down time and troubleshooting”… from everyone.
As folks that obviously run production parts, I’d really like to hear what kind and size parts (quantity of parts per chamber) you are all running and at what cost per part you are charging to outsiders (vendor/wholesale) versus your own in-house products (direct to consumer)
As someone who manufactures CNC and via other methods, I’m finding it extremely difficult to wrap my head around how you all are handling “cost per part”.
I don’t expect anyone to answer this publicly…but like to possibly get an individual offline discussion going or hear more webinars from Formlabs themselves on this topic.
In regards to production running parts for outside parties (vendor/wholesale)
We’ve had hundreds of hours troubleshooting ourselves, trying to convince Formlabs there is in fact an issue, before them acknowledging it to fix it in firmware, replacement parts n full machine replacement. Find it extremely hard to believe an hourly run time cost could even be figured out on this system, at least from our experiences.
What is your Hourly figured into your production running of parts?
We’ve also tossed entire chambers of parts in the trash from all these same issues you all mention. So there’s the “failed chamber” cost/percentage that needs to be calculated into this material cost per job/PO.
How are you justifying and pricing material cost per chamber/part?
Again, as someone who manufactures and who is used to calculating cost per part, I’m just overall finding it an extremely niche use case between machining and injection and even harder to calculate compared to other methods of manufacturing.
While manufacturing our own “in-house” parts that go direct from us to consumer, I find it pricey but doable. I just can’t figure how anyone is manufacturing to outside POs/vendors.
With over two decades of experience “in the field”…I’m also very familiar with “defense and aerospace” where you can pretty much make up any cost per part you like between you and Uncle Sam…and add 100% to that…. So no need to hear from anyone justifying it in that world…I get it.
I’d just like to hear how you all are making use of it and not upside down on cost, offering this as a production option in the real world…with multiple machines. Also, I’d be interested to learn how many of you manufacture via other means as well to include CNC and injection molding or if you are coming into manufacturing strictly via additive manufacturing methods?
Feel free to message direct as I’d honestly like to know.
To me, cost of material MUST go down and/or machine dependability MUST go up to make this a realistic option….then it would be game changing.
We´ll sort out an answer to the questions we can answer and send you a pm with contactinfo.
Cheers @LEADNAV and everyone else contributing.
Andreas
As per email I appreciate you contributing to this discussion and just for everyone else, I wanted to get some of that info out there.
As I stated to you direct
I can actually see your niche being similar to ours in that we are providing direct to consumer parts that change frequently and therefore not worth running an injection mold. Your parts or at least individual components are also smaller and I imagine you could get up there in the 30-50+ per chamber. You are also priced well for that to consumer.
I totally understand your model and it working. I’ve used your parts and they are outstanding. Part of our reason for bringing in SLS.
I’m just trying to figure out how these other folks are trying to run production parts outside of their own business to consumer, to wholesale and serve outside PO’s.
I’ve figured out that regardless of what is in it… I have to charge, lets say, around roughly $2,000 USD per chamber to do “ok” in my small shop and that’s really for a ¾ filled chamber and at break-even/making a living pay. That’s backyard “good pay”. Not sure how that would work outside of a backyard in a big facility with employees… “kind of pay”. Also, that’s if the machine stays running without issues or major replacement of it or its components… “kind of pay”.
So, any part you can fit 50-75 units into a single chamber…direct to consumer…you are ok. I have had folks come to me though with jobs where I’d only be able to fit 10-20 parts in a chamber and divide that into that set cost per chamber it just isn’t realistic. Also, if they are larger parts, I am taking a big gamble that the chamber doesn’t fail. As that would eliminate any real margin on that PO.
This manufacturing pricing is very different and hard for folks to understand when I quote them. It is unlike CNC where the cost of material is based on the individual material needed for that part. It is also different than FDM where the cost of material can be calculated from the amount of plastic squeezed out of the nozzle.
It is determined off of how many parts you can jam into that set $$$ chamber and while running Nylon 12 GF at 60-70% refresh… everything in between is realistically wasted money.
As stated to you Andrea, your use case is an excellent example of this being a great system for it. Thank you for contributing to this community discussion.
Like to hear from others but in particular those trying to do larger parts and/or serve outside PO’s.
I personally don’t think this system can expand its niche use case, without greatly reducing the cost of material and/or increasing the dependability and up time of the system…but I’d like to be proven wrong.
I am also open to a direct exchange. We only run one Fuse1+ with Nylon 12, but it is quite reliable. We have not yet had a complete print abort in approx. 60 print jobs.
Our calculated prices can therefore partly keep up with those of large service providers.
@Andreasemilsson I would also be interested in your data here if you would like to share it.
They didn’t need to supply anything really as their parts are listed online as they sell direct to consumer. Which I imagine you do to.
I’m trying to find a person who is actually manufacturing for outside companies, under PO/wholesale costs. As you would be able to do with any other manufacturing capability.
I’m seeing that the cost is just way to high for that so I’m assuming everyone owning a Fuse is manufacturing “their own parts” for sale direct to consumer and/or making up whatever price they want for defense or aerospace.
@Andreasemilsson As I’m sure you’ll see below, we’ve had a similar problem (Nylon 12). At the time, I was having issues with top (aka z-axis) prints caving in slightly and my resolution to this was to raise the temperature, which did help and also helped some other surface finish issues. I think we ended up at 181C.
Seemingly randomly, we’d get one or two parts from a batch that had that similar orange peel.
We changed refresh rates to 50/50, then 100% fresh and still had the problem. In contacting FL Support, they had a whole process to make sure that the IR sensor was reading properly including cleaning out the cone from that white powder (forgot the name) crystals. (Side note - @Victor_J_ST noted that it is part of the regular maintenance after every print, but we clean it every so 3-4 prints or so.)
We cleaned it the cone and no change, so the next recommendation from FL was to drop back down to 180C.
We did that and have not had an issue with orange peel and the top surface caving is something that we just work around to orient the part with minimal 0 degree Z-axis exposure.
Everything is a compromise here and it’s hard to find that goldilocks zone. Not sure if it’s the same thing with larger, more expensive printers.
@LEADNAV I agree that this should probably be it’s own thread. I’m quite open about my business model, so I don’t mind sharing our values. Keep in mind that our model is unique and we don’t expect anyone to analyze it with their own input of how or what we’re doing. It works for us.
I should also mention, that we’re not looking to have the printer be a sustaining revenue stream/profit center for us, but rather have the printer pay for itself and not represent a monthly financial liability.
In my own business, I split the time on the printer in one of three ways.
I print my own parts for production. Our integration of FL SLS parts into our larger assemblies is a small percentage of the overall sales price of our parts. We are a B2B operation, but occasionally our equipment does get sold directly at a consumer level. We are also split between selling direct to other businesses and selling to distributors as wholesale.
With idle time on the printer when we’re not in production, I’m enrolled in a print service as a manufacturing partner and we adjust pricing in the service based on how available our printer is (example: if we’re in production, we adjust very high, and if available, we compete with market rates). Explanation of our pricing is below.
We do what we call ‘rideshare’, where we accept orders on the print service and shove some of our own production/prototype parts in the chamber. We do this primarily to keep print densities higher and minimize waste.
For context, we are into 6 months of a 3 year lease on a single Fuse 1+ and Sift. For simple numbers, we pay approximately $1K/month for the lease. The burdened cost just to operate the printer with no profit works out to be between $75-80/day (assuming 20 day/month availability) and excludes powder. This burden includes lease payment, electricity, amortized media blaster cost, replacement glass media and estimated labor to cover processing 1-2 chambers a day.
Under #1 above, where we do our own production, the daily operational rate dwarfs the price of the product, but for reference, a full chamber of production SLS parts actual costs represents about 6-10% of the end product retail price.
Under #2 with the print service, pricing is based on the summation of three values. Part volume (aka mass), bounding box and surface area. For giggles, let’s say volume pricing is about $0.20/cm3, bounding box price is about $0.020/cm3 and surface price is $0.025/cm3. We have set minimums for a per piece and per file. The thing to understand with this pricing is that the print service takes a cool 25% off the top of our pricing for themselves. With this scenario, most of the time we’ve come out with a 10-30% profit margin. We can make a killing on some chambers… others barely any margin. Unfortunately, we’ve recently been in a position where we we’ve had low density builds and been forced to bank or discard recycled powder, but our pricing is sufficient to stay above breakeven.
Generally, we spend most of our time under scenario 3 as a ride-share. We do have dedicated chambers for our own production, but I’d say about 50% of our time we’re packing our own parts, or internal prototypes into a customer’s order to help lower the per part cost and minimize waste.
We exclusively use Nylon 12, so that works out to be $100/kilo, market rate. FL does have discount and subscription programs. 36 kg/mo for 12 months will get you 20% discount. Bulk order discount is 54 kg for 10%, or 108 kg for 15%. We average about 24 kg/month and we’re hoping to cross the 36 kilo/month threshold in the next 3-4 months which will certainly support our bottom line.
Lot’s more to this, of course, but this post is already long enough.
Appreciate the feedback. Very interesting business model with the ride share etc… also hearing from someone else hoping to just “break even” with this system. Haha
I am still in the search for someone else actually “making money” running production parts for other people. I don’t think it is possible with this system as it currently is, with cost of material but also interesting that you mention a subscription discount for at least helping to do so, for powder, as Formlabs never once mentioned this in all our discussions. However, they have shipped plenty of free powder due to all the issues with this system running Nylon 12 GF…so maybe they still aren’t confident in their Nylon 12 GF to offer something like that.
Outside of our own parts, direct to consumer, we do have one steady outside contract to build parts but it only works because this person sells an entire “kit” of manufactured items and we are just one component of that. So we only make it work in this niche scenario because we are charging full price on our component at “break even” cost on that part for this person to have it in his kit. So it is truly not a great scenario of manufacturing wholesale to an outside company…
I have spoken to so many people now, in the past two years, who had hopes that this was a production part running system… I actually heard the story of two companies who started a company in hopes of manufacturing around this system to later go under as they realized this was not a reality. One of these was in the prosthetics industry which ran into issues. I find it funny that Formlabs had this possibility up on their website early on when we purchased this system as a use case…but you don’t see that use case advertised much anymore…
I will fire this thread up in General Discussions as I beleive it is important for folks researching this system to have expectations of what it is for. Hopefully in the future it gets there…but it currently is not a manufacturing possibility outside of building your own in-house parts and/or obviously it is great for prototypes.
Appreciate all the feedback and will let you all get back to discussing what I created this initial thread for…which is for faulty Fuse’s.
Why don’t you look at another brand for SLS?
Our model is actually currently likewise a mixture of our own and commissioned parts.
Of course, our own parts are the best calculated. Here we can print three product sets with one build space, which are sold assembled for about 1200€.
But the order section is already getting bigger and bigger. Here we already have several customers from the local area, who occasionally order parts. In the meantime, we also have contact with companies that work as “intermediaries”, so to speak. These take component inquiries and look for the best producer. Here we already get requests for quantities up to 500 pieces, which of course have to be calculated accordingly.
Here we have already received feedback that our prices would be surprisingly good and would actually rather be expected from large companies with EOS machines.
The additional advantage we have here is that we can deliver smaller quantities of parts much faster.
Since we have not had any failed print builds so far and hardware defects have been covered by the service so far, we can currently calculate accordingly low.
By the way, we are currently experimenting with a powder modification, which we have now already observed in several industrial plants at customers. Here, additional water (distilled) is added to the powder before mixing. Using a spray bottle, a small amount of moisture is added to the powder to improve the flow properties.
Here, the industrial manufacturers say that too dry powder has a low flow property and it can therefore come to clumping or rough spots in the sintering surface, which in turn can lead to print failures.
The first results whether and what it is bringing, we will probably have next week…
From what I’ve seen so far, true production manufacturing doesn’t happen till you leap into an HP MJF system at the $400k and up price. We have folks running 2-3 of these at that scale.
However I’m all ears…let me know which other brand, make and model you have personal experience running in SLS that you’d suggest?
When you say your getting orders for 500 parts…I’d be curious to know how many of those parts are you getting into one chamber and at what cost to customer per part… and what you consider a good rate.
I’m getting orders for 500 units as well and can get around 100 of these units per chamber. I’m actually only printing 1/2 - 3/4 full chambers at this time so roughly 80 units per chamber as I found doing full chambers in the Fuse 1+ is too taxing on the heater bulbs and optical cassette.
Can discuss offline in messaging if more comfortable but would like to bounce numbers to compare.
I don’t have personal experience from SLS, just saying than fuse 1 may not be the only choice one has for SLS.
Some others from HP are indeed at 100k+, so does that mean that unfortunately the only affordable (cheap?) choice for SLS is Fuse?
Here’s a list of alternatives
Haven’t been doing larger parts as we been running chambers of 80-100 smaller units and everything has been running okay at the 70% refresh.
However, I just started printed some larger parts, 8 per chamber, and while all the parts are configured pretty much the same in the chamber, “two” of the eight units had this “orange peel” on one side. (pics attached) I don’t know why just those two on the same corner of the part… assuming they were located in the same area of the chamber but again they share the same orientation as the other six units and the rest of the part looks fine…
Wandering if increasing chamber temp would help this… as I barely see a surface armor being printed anymore as it is so faint compared to in the past when I had all the issues.
Thoughts? How is yours doing with this orange peel?
Also, wandering if I need to “increase chamber temp” slightly for larger parts and put it back down for all the smaller parts as they have been turning out good…?
Good morning @LEADNAV
Yeah thats sadly the Fuse 1+ acting up.
I don´t think chambertemp is the issue. Bedtemp tho, just might be the villain.
Try raising the bedtemp +2degrees celsius and you might get lucky.
Thats the tip we got from Formlabs when we saw this. Still the prints aren´t good enough when it comes to accuracy.
Our replacement Fuse1+ arrives today, so hopefully this one will work as intended.
Do i have doubts? Let´s say im not conviced that it will be better. But Formlabs wanted it back so their engineering team could take a look at it.
Fingers crossed.
I don’t think this is anything to do with bed temp. After looking at the parts more, 6 of the 8 units were orange peeled on the same side of the part even though they were alternated top to bottom. I assume the 6 units were of the same row which would mean the orange peel happened on the side towards the chamber wall.
The two that look fine I assume were the pair by themselves.
Because they alternate, there is no way bed temp affected the 3 in the upper orientation.
You could say it is because they are too close to the chamber wall… but as they alternate… the upper 3 have nearly an inch of stand off compared to the lower orientated 3 that are much closer.
Only thing I could think to try…is rotate the chamber of parts to put them along a side wall versus along the front of the chamber… or increase chamber temp to harden up the surface armor more.
This is what I wish Formlabs would help with more… versus us spending $500-750 worth of powder in a chamber to troubleshoot and problem solve on our own…
When we had the exact same issue, we were advised to raise the bedtemp +2 degrees celsius and that worked for us. Our affected parts was in the outer parts aswell. I think we had like 6 out of 16 parts that was affected by orange peel.
Our replacement Fuse 1+ should have arrived yesterday but seems to be arriving today. Hopefully we can have it up and running tomorrow atleast to try it out.
On another topic. Have you noticed any instances where your measurements such as holes etc have been bigger than they should be?
If i print the same job in one of the Fuse 1 printers they are all good and snug as intended. But with the Fuse 1+ the diameters of holes, cavitys etc are really inconsistent.
If we can´t trust the Fuse 1+ with accuracy then we are up the creek without a paddle so to speak.
Would love to hear if you have had any experience with this issue.
Cheers Damian and have a good evening. Thx again for all your input. Most valuable to have someone more fighting the good fight of getting a good print. 
