Does anyone know how to bypass the resin fill part 3 of 5. Usually I have to wait for 2 hours before it says error and then I press continue to go on without filling. Why does it do that? Anyone have any info? Thank you.
1 Like
It does that because your cartridge is empty.
What if I have more than enough in the tray?
1 Like
This is apparently what Formlabs wants the user experience to be. I have received emails from support advising me they have no intention of fixing it because they see it as a necessary safety check to avoid damaging the film in the tank.
Their argument that running a print with too little resin could damage the film in the tank ignores the fact that they allow users to ignore the fill warning, but only after waiting an unacceptable amount of time. Why would they give users the option to ignore or bypass an essential safety feature whose purpose is to avoid damage to the machine?
Either it is an essential safety feature that should never be bypassed, or it is not, and they should allow users to ignore or bypass the warning immediately without a wait. Which is it?
Other users have noted that the mandatory wait before a user can bypass the mandatory fill sequence may be a way of nagging or annoying users to always have resin available to keep the tank full. I even have support emails telling me that I shouldn’t expect to be able to use the final 300+ mL of resin!
I recommend opening a support case and complaining so they hopefully change their minds and issue a fix.
1 Like
After sever communication from the support, they still recommend you buying another full cartridge.
The best margin for FL products is the resin. The machine I would say is losing money or just a little.
The Form2 still has the lawsuit with 3Dsystems and cut 8% of each sale as a settledown.
Despite people seeming to believe that this is some kind of diabolical plan by Formlabs to get you to buy more resin, it actually is not.
What’s going on here is actually kind of the opposite - we’re trying to get every drop of resin out of that cartridge. Because some of our resins are quite viscous, especially if you run your printer in a cool room, we try to dispense for a long time - we open and close the dispense valve something like 100 times before giving up and throwing the error that your cartridge is empty.
You might also be thinking, “but there’s more than enough resin in my tank already!” Because having the tank run dry during a print is bad for your print job and for the tank itself, we try very hard to avoid that. Therefore, we have several levels the tank checks for: a “too high” level, aka tank is too full, which might push resin over the edge into your printer, a “just right” level which is where we try to keep it, and a “too low” level where we think it could run dry. If the tank level is below “too low”, it won’t start the print.
Now, due to feedback from y’all as well as our own internal printing, let’s talk about what we’re doing to fix this. We’re doing several things - we’re cutting the time in half for when it decides your cartridge is empty (down to 50 dispenses) and we’re also working on using the cartridge weight sensors (the F3 & F3L have weight sensors under the cartridges, however their readings are more noisy than we expected so have been difficult to use for this purpose). We’re also working on logic where instead of a single “too low” level for the tank, we take the size of your job into account to figure out a dynamic “too low” level for the job - as in, if your job is tiny, then being below the “too low” line likely shouldn’t matter. We’re also working on a similar enhancement for the end of print behavior.
All of that said, @Kdeezy619 there is one easy way to avoid this (though you need to keep an extra cartridge of resin on hand to do this). Before you start a print, just lift the cartridge with your hand and feel how much resin is left. If it’s almost empty, take it out, and put the full cartridge in. Start your print, which should start pretty quickly. Then take your almost empty cartridge, close the lid, and flip it upside down so all the resin flows up to the top (like you do with an almost empty shampoo bottle). At the end of your print, transfer whatever resin is left in your almost empty cartridge to either your tank, or into the new cartridge (that now should have some space in it).