Robox (CEL) support total failure

I'm a kickstarter backer of the first hour the robox printer was online (don't take that literal)

After a lot of waiting and then another year of waiting until the software, called AutoMaker, matured, horray, I was finally making my first steps into the 3D printing world.

The huge disappointment came 4 months ago.
Read the story ...

After only 500 hours of printing, the needle valve was stuck.
A thing I predicted on the CEL forum, the more parts something has, the more things can go wrong. It all complicates things.
Well, needed to send it back for repair, and after politely asking the unsuspecting client, being me, if I wanted a repair, they did so.
Why would I not want it to be repaired, CEL support asked me to send the part over for repair in the first place.

Well, I got it back after 2 months (!!!)
The print head failed after a few prints, some pre-print checks didn't work.
CEL support, well, just told me: send the printer, we will just replace the guts of your printer to a new update ?
WHAT ?
No thank you, it's just the print head that has something wrong, something you just repaired by the way.

After a lot of arguments and investigation from my part (certainly they were not helpfull there), I found out: the head seal was blown.
O no, that happened a lot, just read the CEL forum about it.
So, support, what now ?
O sorry, poor customer, but did you really expect a 3 year old print head would last for much longer ?
Excuse me, Mr. CEL support, you DID ask me to let you repair a print head that is end of life ?
To me, and end user that has no clue about that ?
No advice given that I should replace the print head ?

Now comes the clue: CEL is out of stock for the last half year or so of fresh print heads.

CEL support taking responsibility for their mistake (repairing a print head that is end of life): well, not in this lifetime it seems.
CEL support reacting when I go to their forum about it: they ban me, left me in the dark why I would be banned, they claimed it was a "mystery".
Now they cut off all connection, I can't even read in the forum anymore, my account is deactivated, can't log in to support, nothing.

This is what CEL is doing to me today.
Contacting someone on CEL ?
I have no idea how i could do that, even their general contact form bounces.
OK, contacting Chris Elsworthy, after all, he's the one running the show, and the only one at CEL I never spoke to in any way.
All great, but I could not find an email address, and I'm not into all this social media madness, you won't find me there.

So, here I am.
"advertising" about CEL.

It would have been so great to tell you all how CEL took responsibility and took great care of one of their original backers of their kickstarter campaign,
certainly after all the mistakes they piled up until today.
It has become a totally different message.

Well, Chris Elsworthy, it would be wonderfull to hear a reaction from you,
one which has a great and fair solution, not one with the boring excuses I get from Pete (who banned my account by the way)

You'd think they'd have sent you a new printhead in the first place.
Wow - replacement printheads START at £149 !

indeed.
All this trouble and now bad publicity (as a last resort) just to make a 60£ on repair fees.
In fact all they had to do at start was saying:
"sorry, your print head is at end of life and we're out of stock, wait until we have fresh print heads"
and I would have considered this as acceptable.

The information that was left out of this statement is that the print head in question was at least one year out of warranty when it had a problem. As a Robox user I know that the failure that this user states caused the print head's second failure happens without warning, so even though the technician worked on the print head, there was no way to predict that this failure would occur. The majority of my print heads have lasted hundreds of hours past their "end of life", so there was no reason for the technician to predict the failure and offer a replacement instead of a repair, especially considering a repair was a little less than 1/3 the price of a replacement. It is unfortunate that the second failure happened so soon after the repair, but as the technician offered a repair of the printer itself instead of immediately looking to the print head as the source of the issue, there was no suspicion that the print head would fail again.

Yes, the Robox print head is complex. The complexity brings a functionality to the printer that the KickStarter supporters and the manufacturer felt was worth exploring. Having compared the Robox to a printer without this technology, I prefer my Robox printer because of its simplicity of operation and the fact that I calibrate it once and then don't have to worry about it unless the head needs to be replaced. There are no adjustments needed for flow rates for different materials, I have two nozzles available on the head, and I can switch between them on consecutive prints or even in the same print to get the benefits of both a detail nozzle and a fill nozzle. For me and the way I use my printer, this is worth the cost of the print head. The last E3D I looked at was half the price of the Robox print head and was just a hot end with a single nozzle.

It is interesting to note that this user is the only one I have ever heard of being banned from the Robox forum, and I am fairly active in that forum. It makes me wonder what caused the moderator of the forum to change three years of precedent for this user.

AZGTi

you defend CEL without valid arguments, and without reading my message completely.

Who speaks about warranty ? Certainly not me, that is not the issue here.
Did you see what all happened in the support ticket communication ?
I really don't think so. Support stated THEMSELF that this print head should NOT have been replaced, that it was END OF LIFE, statement of CEL, not mine.

And to make matters a lot worse, they were not able to diagnose the second problem (blown seal), although for a trained CEL technician this should have been obvious.

To conclude: keep wandering: WHAT caused them to ban me ?
Please ask on the CEL forum, investigate, please ...
I'm very curious what that could be, they also deleted or deactivated my account on their ticket service.
I would really like to know.

You claim to be very active on this forum (so am I), but I can't remember you at first glance.
I could investigate, but, o no, I'm even prevented from READING the forum now, that's how bad CEL reacted.
In effect: they refuse me as a client, despite the fact I have their product and every right to have it fixed.

I'm not the only one with problems regarding service to my robox unit.
Go ahead and investigate a lot more.
Someone mailed me yesterday what happened with that most recent topic, complaining about CEL support.
Vanished ...
So I published it here.

I communicate with CEL clients outside the forum, where I see 2 things:
- lot's of complaints about CEL support and CEL not taking responsibility for their mistakes
- lot's of customers simply being afraid to speak out their mind in public, because they fear loosing hardware support or worse, getting their forum messages deleted.

AZGTi
what a joke ...

Do you have the courage to reveal you identity ?
I give you the chance, if you don't t ake it I'll do it in your place.

But a spoiler: very well connected with ... CEL

to keep this on a fair basis - if you reveal his identity - the you should reveal yours as well.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by curious aardvark

to keep this on a fair basis - if you reveal his identity - the you should reveal yours as well.

---

But of course.
I'm @pelgrim on the CEL forum.
http://www.cel-robox.com/members/pelgrim/

Same as I use here.
Can't be said about AZGTi.

I am confused - there is no warranty coverage on your print head, so all options are at cost to you. You were offered a repair, which you accepted and paid for, and the print head worked for a while after you received it. What is your complaint? If I had been offered a 60.00 repair instead of a 159.00 replacement, I would have gone with the repair. And you state that support told you the head should not have been replaced, or repaired. I am confused, because you state both, and I have been offered the option on my failed print heads. I would think they would treat everyone about the same and offer both options if they are available. In your case, they offered a repair because it seems they were out of stock on replacement and that was the only option available. I am extrapolating what may have happened based on the information you present in this thread.
In my experience, having seen my share of failed print heads, that the o-ring failure that claimed your head can cause symptoms also caused by another failure and often can't be identified until the print head is tested either on a different printer, which is how I identify it, or by disassembling the print head. As I have never been instructed to disassemble the print head and have actually been told repeatedly not to disassemble the print head, how else was the tech to identify the failure? If yours was obvious, perhaps you should have brought it up before returning the printer? There was no sign of it on the original service for the print head, again extrapolating from what I know about CEL support. It seems to me that the tech was going with the most likely solution for the behavior you reported.

Technicians are human and make mistakes, but I don't see a mistake in this situation. The tech was working with the best knowledge available. I am basing this off what you have reported and what I know about CEL support from my personal interactions with them.

Are you referring to the other post on here about the technician "stealing" the printer? I read that post too and it seems like the user who posted it may be overreacting. If this user sent in their printer for repair, threatening a police report seems like a poor way to address the issue. Wasn't this user pretty abusive on the CEL forum to one of their techs several months ago? Maybe I have the wrong user, but the names seem similar, and I think I remember that user being admonished for personal attacks on the forum. If he is abusive on the CEL forum, perhaps he is abusive on his support tickets also and there is more to that story than was in his post?

Common Ben, don't play stupid.

I explained it very clearly in my first message, now you choose to ignore that.
How poor of you.

1. my print head was end of life because it was 3 years old
2. me, the customer with no knowledge of this, was asked if the print head should be repaired, without any kind of warning
3. so of course a normal customer thinks: sure, make the repair !
4. the seals blew after a few prints, seals, my dear friend, that CEL just had replaced !

Whatever you come up with, you just can't defend such an action from support.
So yes, they are fully responsible.

And Ben, since you're not a representative in Europe for CEL, please don't act like you are or you know the case.
And I ask you politely: stick to the topic.

In my experience, CEL does not repair or replace damaged o-rings in their print heads because of the cost. At least that is what they have always told me. So I think there must have been some misunderstanding. There are seals on the nozzles that can be repaired, but the o-ring seals can't from what I have heard. So maybe that is part of what happened? Maybe the problem was two different things?
I am trying to understand what happened because my experience with CEL is so much different than what you are reporting.

I'm glad you admit "I'm trying to understand what happened".

I'm not happy that you blindly defend CEL just because you're a payed contractor in the US.
There is really a list already of people that are
1. are happy with your technical input
2. laughing their ass off when you defend CEL time and again while not knowing all the facts or just make things up as you go

So you point out ANOTHER mistake from support: they forgot to tell me there are more then one seal, and that PERHAPS they opened another seal.
The seals were not the original problem.

You see, the point remains the same:
the ASKED a customer with no knowledge if they needed to repair a print head of 3 years old,
which they state themself is by their definition end of life.
Did they give me that information ?
NOPE.

They only asked the money and got paid for a useless repair and gave me back a worthless print head.
Don't degrade yourself in defending this.

The original repair was a stuck valve - from your original post. I have had several of these repairs performed. The heads have worked fine afterward and to my knowledge don't require changing seals. This repair would have not affected any of the seals on a print head. So you got it back and used it for several prints. Then the o-ring failed. So what is the issue with how you were treated? You paid for them to repair the valve issue. The valve issue would not have affected the seals. So you got what you paid for. Again, there is no indication that the second failure would have occurred in time. I am still trying to understand why you feel you were treated so poorly.

Ben,

I regret so much you play so stupid, because I know you're not.

The mistake is asking a customer without knowledge of the matter if they need to repair an END OF LIFE part.
This is not ethical behaviour, but plain money grabbing and profiting from the ignorance of a customer.
You don't do that if you want to build up a long term relationship with a customer.

"Repairing" the print head that is past it's END OF LIFE is the responsibility CEL bears and caused all the problems that came after it.
Since CEL does not have spare print heads any more, it becomes clear support in this case choose the option where they can make money the fastest way.
The correct would be: customer, sorry for your print head, but we advice to wait until we have new print heads in stock and buy a new one.

That would have been not so fun news, but perfectly acceptable and honest.
I would still be without a working printer now, but would not have followed the ill advised actions by support that led only to further problems,
problems that started because I got an print head back to work with that was END OF LIFE, and that support failed to see the symptoms (or look for it) of a blown seal.
So in the end mistake was piled upon mistake.

You simply can't defend that without damaging your credibility as an independent contractor.
But I perfectly understand that you prefer not to bite the hand that feeds you,
after all as a private contractor working for CEL you must have a considerable income out of it,
certainly as we all observe in the CEL forum the huge amount of work you spend in playing a huge wall between us and CEL staf.

To be blunt, in half of the cases you give very FAST and good response on the forum, although from time to time you are to mechanical and fail to see when software is a part of the problem.
In the other half of the cases, you're simply in the way between us and CEL, because in a lot of cases we want explicitly CEL to answer, not you, because as you say,
you are not there (at CEL HQ), but are "just" an external contractor.

To sum things up and stay at topic:
support made blunder after blunder in this case, and CEL needs to take responsibility.
That means repairing potential damage done by following the instructions from support,
and pay back the ill advised repair of the print head.

The technician who worked on this repair posted his side of the story today. It makes an interesting read, countering his viewpoint with yours. I have to - still - side with the tech on this one after hearing both your stories. Causing damage to the printer and then blaming the manufacturer isn't a really good way to get service exceptions. If CEL decided not to make an exception anyway the damage must have been pretty serious. Their instructions are really quite easy to follow in my experience. Then to make personal attacks and to spam their ticketing system? That is just rude.

While this can be interesting to read, it's a lie I caused damage to the printer.
I only did what he told me to do, if he says otherwise, he's lying to safe himself from blame.

Also interesting: I can't read what he posted since I'm banned on the forum, yes, also from reading.

So if you choose to call me a liar and you simply believe him because he's a CEL employee, and me not, then we will never get anywhere, isn't it.

My point still stands: i got the wrong advice from CEL which caused a whole chain of events that caused a lot of problems.
CEL is 100% responsible for that and should resolve these problems.

You Ben, are nor involved in this, nor are you able or appointed judge in this,
so it's still a puzzle to me why a USA external contractor tries to mingle in this,
I live in Europe, CEL is based in Europe, remember ?

Are you paid to do this by CEL ?

I receive no compensation for posting on this forum. I am just a curious person who saw that what you were reporting differed from my own experience and so I am trying to understand what happened. I saw your posts linked on the CEL forum and was curious about what would have caused them to reportedly ban you and also what would have caused two customers to have such aggressive responses. CEL has always provided me with excellent service and I am just trying to understand why your experience was so different.
From what I have read, it appears that your ban was due to your reported behavior toward them. Your behavior toward them was uncalled for, especially as the reported damage was caused through your insistence to attempt to repair the printer yourself after they recommended you return it for repair.

I refuse to use tricks on a website where I'm not welcome, it's like they try to provoke to do something wrong :)
Otherwise I would use TOR, easy enough.

regretfully I have to report that CEL did still nothing to resolve the issue,
nor did anyone of CEL respond here on the forum.

And Ben, who replied here, is not considered as a part of CEL, but more like a blockade between us customers and CEL.

Well, after all this time, still no response from Chris E. ...

OK, Firstly to declare a conflict of interest. We sell Robox printers etc... We are, apart from that, fully independent from Cel-Robox.

Our perspective on this is as a support provider (although not for Robox as they prefer to do this themselves). So I don't seek to take one side or the other but it is an independent opinion from our experiences.

It is not good that you have come away from this whole experience with a bad feeling. But we would like to say, remember that people are people and that it is very unlikely that any mistakes that you feel they have made are the result of some nefarious or underhanded attitude. Companies do not forego good customer support for a quick buck (although it does depend on the business model). So you have to assume that what response you did get was given with a desire to help. We are not involved so this is just an assumption based on human nature and our experience of business.

As to the question of whether they should have repaired it or told you to buy a new one. It's not really advisable to give advice to customers because they can come back at you - "you said I should do this and it didn't work" (for them). For example if they had advised you to buy a new head you may have discovered that you could have got the old one fixed for £60 and you may have been miffed (you wouldn't have been aware the O ring was going to fail). So this could have gone either way.

You have to remember that you own the machine, you are the decision maker, it's your responsibility. The manufacturer and seller have responsibilities, which in our experience they are happy to take on, but there is only so much responsibility they can shoulder, and I don't mean from a legal perspective but from a moral perspective.

So, with respect to the forum, I think that depends on how much a nuisance you were making of yourself. If you were trolling across all threads, regardless of their relevancy to your grievance, then yes it would probably be a good idea to ban you because then you are spoiling it all for everyone else. If you have your own thread then I don't see why they did it.

So I guess the question is how would you like this to end so that you came away satisfied, then ask yourself the question as to whether that would be a justifiable expectation. I include the last part as it is our experience that people's expectations for what would satisfy them can be sometimes unrealistic; "I want 10 new 3D printers and an all expenses paid trip to Las Vegas". I'm not saying your expectations are not justified by the way.

Customer support, to a large extent is about managing customer expectations. like everything you can't get it right all the time. If we were to have a take home message it would be that generally people are trying to do their best to help.

Anyway that's our four pennies worth.

you got a few assumtions wrong.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by iDig3Dprinting

It is not good that you have come away from this whole experience with a bad feeling. But we would like to say, remember that people are people and that it is very unlikely that any mistakes that you feel they have made are the result of some nefarious or underhanded attitude. Companies do not forego good customer support for a quick buck (although it does depend on the business model).

---

Never said they do.
I was given the wrong advice, time and again.
If I was an isolated case, you could indeed doubt that.
Just stroll on the CEL forum, you will discover there is at least one individual at their help desk that gets it wrong on a regular basis.
As far for their business model, they do very questionable things.
Let users do open source work in their free time and not intervening.
Then just "oops" dropping all compability with that work done where there was no reason to do so: work down the drain.
I'm not talking about myself here, I refused to do any work until I got the support from CEL, which we of course never got.
Making a quick buck seems exactly the way they are going for the last 6 months, their latest products show that clearly.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by iDig3Dprinting

As to the question of whether they should have repaired it or told you to buy a new one. It's not really advisable to give advice to customers because they can come back at you - "you said I should do this and it didn't work" (for them).

---

1. they didn't give me the option to buy a new print head, you can bet on it because they are for some obscure reason without new print heads for 6 months now or so
2. support stated themselves AFTERWARDS, when the damage was done, that this seal breaking was nothing more then natural, because the print head was way out of life expectancy.
Answer me honestly: do you ask a customer to repair part that is long past it's end of life ?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by iDig3Dprinting

You have to remember that you own the machine, you are the decision maker, it's your responsibility. The manufacturer and seller have responsibilities, which in our experience they are happy to take on, but there is only so much responsibility they can shoulder, and I don't mean from a legal perspective but from a moral perspective.

---

does not fit the philosophy they pretend with their marketing: just print out of the box, robox does it all for you, no knowledge required.
You could not expect some good advise from support, if you market this way, you MUST advise your customer.
Go repair your car, you will get GOOD advise from your local dealer, it will not be "your the owner, we leave it all up to you".

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by iDig3Dprinting

So, with respect to the forum, I think that depends on how much a nuisance you were making of yourself. If you were trolling across all threads, regardless of their relevancy to your grievance, then yes it would probably be a good idea to ban you because then you are spoiling it all for everyone else. If you have your own thread then I don't see why they did it.

---

I defended my case in an orderly fashion, they refused to take any kind of responsibility, so when they begin to loose face, they ban you.
I'm not the first.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by iDig3Dprinting

So I guess the question is how would you like this to end so that you came away satisfied, then ask yourself the question as to whether that would be a justifiable expectation. I include the last part as it is our experience that people's expectations for what would satisfy them can be sometimes unrealistic; "I want 10 new 3D printers and an all expenses paid trip to Las Vegas". I'm not saying your expectations are not justified by the way.

---

LOL
I asked them for a reasonable compensation for their mistakes, in those exact words.
Never got an offer ...

But what I expected was very reasonable:
- compensate the £60 wrongly spend on repairing an end of life part
- perform an inspection of my printer since some damage was done, explicit on their advice and executed exactly as they asked, with photo's given to support on each step.

If they would have done this I would have been happy buying a new print head when they finally have them back on their shelves.
In stead they went deaf and banned me.
Just banned ?
No, they closed all channels, also support, I have no way of contacting them anymore, since I don't live in the UK.

Justifiable expectations ?
Curious what you think of it and if you would agree with this yourself when you run a support team that had this experience.

They would still have a happy customer that advocates their product, like I did for the last 3 years.
Right now I advice everyone I know to stay away from robox.
Being connected to a fablab, this counts for something. Not much, but every bit helps, right ?

I don't know whether we would have compensated you for the print head, that kinda depends whether we thought you should repair it or buy a new one and really we are a shop so we tend to sell components; "Your print head doesn't work, buy a new one". But we run a different business. I think if we did do repairs we would have probably offered you both options, although the fix may have been very straight forward so they may have thought it was the simplest option. On balance, I think probably I wouldn't have offered compensation for this, but that is a personal experience and given not being part of the conversation.

When it comes down to users doing there own work, we would notify them that it would invalidate any warranty that existed and that they did so at their own risk. If they insisted we would provide guidance if we could. However we don't do repairs ourselves per se, we are a shop as I said so our case is a bit different. But we would certainly have expected them to follow this strategy. We would certainly never advise that a customer does their own work. I am surprised they suggested you did do your own work. That has to be a "on your head be it" scenario as you have no idea as to people's competency levels; "I didn't have a screwdriver so I got the side panel off with a hammer". I think with this aspect though, if it was something we had asked you to do (although I seem to remember you saying they offered to bring it in and do it for you (??????)), there are some circumstances in which I could see that we would have brought it in to rectify.

It's a shame this all went wrong for you. Maybe a more robust communications strategy is required by Cel-Robox. I would guess that your only hope now is that they are learning from this experience and applying that to there support. I think for you it sounds like you are not going to get any further, they have decided to close your support ticket. Basically "you're wearing trainers and you ain't getting in". Having said that, if you're not from the UK you may not understand the last comment, it's to do with nightclubs.

Now go and print something, if you still have a 3d printer that is. It's very relaxing watching them print for some unknown reason.

nope, since lets say 4 months or so I'm without a working printer and no options to get what I need.
Everything else is already said.

Not so good. Why don't you have a go at building a 3D printer, it's great fun.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by iDig3Dprinting

Not so good. Why don't you have a go at building a 3D printer, it's great fun.

---

very simple: I'm using my time to build other things, mastering to build a 3D printer is not on my wish list, too much time would be lost.

still no solution, CEL still didn't do anything to correct their errors.

'and some fell on stoney ground'.