My Form3+ has been filling a brand new tank with White V4 resin for well over 3 hours now and still going. The bite valve on the cartridge is fine - plenty of resin is flowing in to the tank and the tank level appears super high - I’m concerned it’s going to overflow! Not sure what to do - what safeguards would stop the printer just filling its innards with resin?
Hi @ijeffray,
I’m so sorry you ran into this issue! Here’s a couple of things that you can try (as per our official support article):
- Ensure that the printer is level.
- Inspect the resin tank:
- Remove the resin tank.
- Check that the float can move freely.
- Reinsert and push the tank all the way back. The touchscreen displays a confirmation message when the resin tank is properly seated.
- Inspect the LevelSense board:
- Remove the resin tank.
- Inspect the LevelSense board. Contact Formlabs Support if you see any damage.
- Recalibrate the LevelSense board:
- Tap the wrench icon on the printer’s touchscreen. The Settings screen appears.
- Tap Maintenance. The Maintenance screen appears.
- Tap Resin Level Calibration.
- Follow the on-screen instructions:
- Tap Next to start the calibration process.
- Remove the resin tank from the printer (if one is inserted) and tap Next.
- Close the printer cover and tap Calibrate.
- Once the calibration process is complete, tap Done.
You also mentioned the bite valve is fine, but sometimes if they are only partially opened, you can wident the slit with a #11 exacto blade. If you’re still seeing the error after trying the above, please contact our support team! They’ll be happy take to take a closer look at what might be going on and get you back to printing successfully.
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Thanks for the quick reply. I was just about to abort the print, but after 3.75 hours of filling, I just heard the print bed being lowered and it’s presently sat in the bottom of the tank preparing to really print the first layer. I do think there’s too much resin in the tank as it’s bubbled up all around the print bed.
This printer always seems to take “a very long time” to fill a tank (way, way longer than my previous Form2 ever took- Form3 seems quite bad in this respect) - very often I have to hit the “Retry” button when it pops up a filling error. I’ve had this with four tanks and five cartridges, but previously I’ve always blamed the bite valve and indeed on one cartridge the bite valve had absolutely no cut in it at all, which is why I’m used to examining that before I even put a new cartrridge in the printer.
The printer is definitely level and has actually been little used. I’m actually in touch with support about this printer anyway as it completely randomly filled itself with resin on the previous (very failed) print and I’ve had to clean the optics.
I think Formlabs could provide more information in general about how long filling is supposed to take, and how high the level in the tank should be for printing to start - I can’t find any such info.
Thanks for the info and suggestions! The times can vary depending on the type of resin, how long it’s been on the shelf, and ambient temperatures, so it’s a bit tough to give a ballpark estimate for how long it should be taking. As long as you physically see the resin dispensing when it says it is, you should be fine, but I agree that Form 3 takes too long to fill.
Personally, I have always manually filled new tanks roughly up to the white line instead of waiting for the auto-dispense to save time. I believe the Form 3 also suggests and recommends this when filling a new tank. The floating resin-sense should prevent any over-fill, as it won’t dispense more resin if the tank has enough in it to print with. We addressed the slow fill times with a completely re-designed bite-valve and cartridge system on Form 4, which fills so fast that I have not felt the need to ever manually fill them. The redesigned valve has a higher flow rate for 5-10 times faster filling than Form 3, depending on the viscosity of the material.
Another note from personal experience, shaking the cartridges can also help for some resins like Rigid 10K, which can have the glass-filled powder settle at the bottom if left on the shelf for an extended period of time. Hope this helps!
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The resin was brand new as of about 4 weeks ago and kept in a 20C room. I do always shake it. But I don’t like the idea of trying to manually dispense in to a tank – that was one of the key reasons I chose the FormLabs system vs other resin printers - the “no contact” nature of how the cartridge system works.
My Optics test print finally finished, but is very much a failure, so this may be the end of the road for me with FormLabs anyway 
Yes, the no-contact ecosystem is great. To clarify, the manual filling is just to save a little bit of time, not a necessary step—the dispense mechanism will work just fine on its own. I’m sorry to hear that the optics test failed, can you tell me a little more about the failure, so I can try and connect you with someone on our services team? Although it’s a bit slower, the Form 3 is still a great machine that produces high-quality parts that you cannot achieve with other resin printers, so I would like to find a solution to get yours back up and running.
I am so fed up with this printer. After a failed print, with “bits” left in the tank, I’m forced to waste £144 on a new one, throw away all the resin that was in the failed tank, and it still took THREE AND A HALF HOURS filling the tank again, even though I MANUALLY FILLED IT before even starting the print this time. This is just awful. This has to be a design flaw. Form2 was never like this.