Resin already consumed!

Formlabs dashboard says I have 72% of my resin bottle left but it stopped filling and I checked. It’s completely empty. How can it be so far off? It is the first bottle in a new tank but still. I can’t have 723mL in my tank

That’s normal, unfortunately.
Yesterday I removed some 30 used Rigid cartridges from the dashboard that ranged from still “having” a few milliliters to some with 700 something so my “stock resin”(as shown in the dashboard) went down over 13 liters.

I gave up estimations a long time ago. What you got I also get many, many times. I can understand a small deviation but yeah, sometimes we’re shown an over half cartridge that’s actually empty while other times it says it’s empty and it has more than half.

Crazy!

OK glad I’m not the only one.

But now I wonder, how can it be so wrong?? I mean, come on…aren’t the variables well understood? Are they not filling the cartridges as full as they should? I feel a bit ripped off here

Also, I don’t think we should accept this as being normal…Formlabs needs to fix this.

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It’s not about being ripped of because sometimes it’s the other way around.
You’d also notice a 700ml difference in weight :slight_smile:

It’s just some bad estimation that unfortunately it’s not only regarding used resin. It’s also bad at print times (can say it takes double the time, that it takes half and once in a blue moon it gets it right).

Can’t you use that resin tank to fool the printer, while you fill the tank with resin from another tank?

What are you trying to achieve by fooling the tank?

There are opposite cases where you still have resin in the tank but printer thinks it’s 0%. So you can fit the empty tank which reports 72% left, and you manually fill the print tank with resin from your other resin bottle.

It will prevent a full bottle from being used if it thinks it has nothing left? That seems like bad design to me

I gave up a long, long time ago relying on the Dashboard to keep track of how much resin I have. I just keep track of the weight. I know what a completely empty cartridge weights. So when I am done using a resin for a print, I weight it, subtract the empty cartridge weight, and then I know how much is left.

Interesting. How much does the resin weigh per mL? And how much does an empty cartridge weigh? Don’t keep this to yourself :stuck_out_tongue:

It probably depends on the type of resin used, but if no one feels like sharing that info, you could always weigh a brand new cartridge for a particular resin and then measure a completely empty cartridge to get the actual weights.

I am curious as to these weights myself and hope others could share to save some time. In fact, maybe we should have a thread where the weights of each resin and an empty cartridge are posted for the community’s reference.

a new Draft V2 is 1430gr

I just had an interesting thought…

formlabs knows how much the resin tray and the lunchbox weighs when empty …we should be able to weigh the tray before a print job with resin in it…and have preform calculate has how much resin is in the tank based on that weight…and then because of the scale that’s actually in the back of the printer (form3+ not sure about 3 or 2 …do they have this too?) …preform would also know the weight is the cartridge!

preform should then be able to do the math and get pretty close to amount of resin in both.!

what we’re missing right now is a way to know how much is in the tank… weighing it and typing in the resulting number in preform before a job should help get this calculation closer and would only require a cheap postal scale etc.

IIRC, and I do not have the information at my home office, an empty cartridge weight about 287 or 387 grams. Unfortunately for you I am not going to drive into my work just so I can tell you what an empty cartridge weights. :smirk:

As for the resins, well each one is going to have a different weight depending upon the density of the resin.

I also forwarded this idea to support …Mostly because it would provide the other half of the equation needed to more accurately figure out how much resin total is available to the printer… both in the cartridge as well as in the tank.

it occurred to me that it would give preform the ability to calculate this number more precisely with this added information. This is only speculation on my part…note that FL should be able to know the weight of all empty cartridges…and know approximately the weight of each filled cartridge based on resin type. they can use those basic numbers to more accurately have a starting point. …does the form 2 or 3 have the built in cartridge scale? like the 3+ does?

I’m afraid it’s not going to help that much because they rely on blocking the cartridge once it’s empty in order to avoid refilling the tank with other resins or adding more resin to the tank etc. (remember that Form3 does not have Open mode like Form2 has). So I assume that under the fear of a possible exploit they won’t change much.

Hi, I’m new user since 3 weeks, and happy so far of the nice quality of the prints.
Let me share my modest experience. I had a chat with FL, who indicated that an empty cartridge is 285 to 295 gram. After each print, I weight the cartridge and write the remaining content on the cartridge label.

Example : HighTemp resin V2 density = 1.1
2022-02-01 : 822.5 g - 290 g = 532.5 g
532.5 / 11 = 48.4 % resin left
2022-02-02 : 800.5 g - 290 = 510.5 g
510.5 / 11 = 46.4 % resin left
I will see if this calculation is correct when I will finish the cartridge…

Consumption : 822.5 g - 800.5 g = 22 g → 20 ml
Preform consumption estimation : 10.52 ml
(note : “Consumption” includes the real consumption : the prints + remaining resin on the platform + resin left on the blade or tweezer after cleaning the tank, etc.)

I didn’t weight the full cartridge at start. It is my intent to do it at start with the new cartriges. The same with the tank content.

I hope this helps.

Here are my measurements for Grey Resin

  • Empty Cartridge: 315g
  • Full Cartridge: 1412g

Therefore Grey Resin is 1.1g/mL

Not really, what’s your conclusion?

Maybe I’m missing something, but why are you dividing by 11?