Recently purchased a brand new Form3 direct from formlabs with Tough 2000 material. I have run 12 prints, amounting to about 560ml of resin used (I calculated this manually), but the Dashboard says I have only used 190ml of resin.
Even worse, the cartridge is actually 100% empty now (I opened it and looked). Why is the resin level so inaccurate? Im assuming the resin tank is where the remaining 440ml of resin is now, but if thats the case, and the machine wont let me print with an empty cartridge, Im going to have to throw away over 400mL of resin!! Thats crazy!
Is this a common issue?
(Yes i submitted a ticket, but was curious what the community thought about this issue)
I suggested to Support that because they know the weight of an empty cartridge we should be able to weigh the cartridge before we do a print and put in that number on the printer this would then allow them to do a double check based on weight of the cartridge I thought there was a scale of these things but evidently maybe that doesn’t work…there isn’t one - Either way it would give us another point of data to calculate if we were the cartridge and the tank and put both numbers in
I did weigh my new cartridge, as well as the empty old one. So ill use that as a data point in the future. But Im worried the big issue is that they may not be tracking how much resin is left in the tank. What happens when I have a full tank, and an empty cartridge. Is all that resin actually wasted?
I heard back from FL support and they said while you can certainly expect the cartridge level to be different than the dashboard estimate, my situation is outside the norm.
They did say this is something they are aware of and have in the “to-do” list.
Also, just some background info from service:
The Resin Level algorithm only subtracts your print volume from the resin cartridge volume. It does not take into account the amount of resin required to fill the tank, or resin wasted into the washing system.
The tank holes approximately 300mL of resin, so if you have a fresh tank, you WILL be off at LEAST 300mL. But they also estimate we lose 200-300mL of resin per 1000mL of printing due to waste.
So, expect about 500mL of printing for the first cartridge when using a brand new/empty tank.