Hi!
I’ve bought my form 3 printer 2 months ago and from the very beginning i’m experiencing this issue. I don’t know if it’s normal, but before everY print, and with any resin, the tank fills up painfully slow, even giving me cartridge draining error. All the cartridges have enough resin to fill up the tank and every time before printing i get the same errors a few times.
My software and firmware are all updated.
Can anyone help?
It seems the bite valve on the cartridges can sometimes be incorrectly formed, so they flow slowly. This can be improved with the vary careful application of a sharp #11 Xacto blade to “widen” the slit in the valve (though you risk going to far and then the valve won’t seal and your machine will get flooded with resin). And I remember someone posting that the actuator that opens the bite valve wasn’t going far enough to fully open the valve, on their machine. So that might be the problem if you’ve tried multiple cartridges with the same result.
There’s also a design fault in the Form 3 - the bite-valve squeezer motor/solenoid doesn’t have enough strength to open the valve.
After the first few cycles it loses force and the fill rate drops to a couple of drips per cycle.
Forget the automatic-fill (and the cartridge level tracking in dashboard) and just unscrew the top off the cartridge and manually fill the tank before each print (only until the float switch rises - don’t overfill).
Also build a box around the printer out of extruded polystyrene sheets (e.g. ThermoRise) - leave a good space around so the air can circulate. That will help stabilise the printer temperature, as the heater is not strong enough to work in less than 18C ambient. (The resin will pour better once at temperature - so worth waiting for it to heat before shaking and pouring.)
I have good results from my Form 3 with those two work arounds.
Also avoid Tough resins, they go out of shape. I have really good, detailed, stable results with the 4K resin.
It’s a great printer apart from the fill and heat…
Andy
Just pour the resin manually into the vat.
Cant understand to look for that complecated solution if it is so simple…
Cheers
Chris
Just wanted to provide another data point. I have exactly the same issue, on multiple cartridges, and multiple kinds of resins.
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