The spacers themselves are perfectly flat, so the problem must be elsewhere.
I’ve got the impression that the problem might be related to the midplate flexing a little bit. If I remove the spacers (mine are both to the right of the touchpad), the area above screw 5 can be depressed half a millimeter or so. And that’s the area where the spacers are elevated. They are interlocked with the midplate already, so fixing/stiffening the midplate better beneath the numpad magnets might solve the problem.
We ordered 4 systems, all in batch 11. All 4 have an issue with either the spacers or the trackpad not being even. Hair gets caught, skin gets caught and the corners and edges are razor sharp. If you press the spacers (even gently), they flex a lot.
Some pictures :
3 of the 4 laptops also had the screw problem on the SSD, 1 won’t accept any screw so the SSD can not be used reliably.
We’ve opened a support ticket. But honestly, this is not what the quality I expected when I ordered these for my team. Either the design of the product is broken, or the QA is poor.
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This is unrelated, but note, that where you have the USB-A expansion card will cause additional power draw during use.
A full overview of the ports can be seen here
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Given the ubiquity of this issue, it is very clearly a design flaw. It’s just not a very good design if it’s this difficult to get right. I’d hate to see the ones that QA does reject!
On the other hand, I am actually glad they didn’t spend more time on this issue and decided to ship as is. I’d much rather live with this and have my laptop than endure even more delays while they try to redesign the touchpads and spacers. Software can be iterated very quickly to resolve issues. Mechanical engineers don’t have that luxury. I’m sure they’re still working on it, and I bet they come out with revised designs within a year or two.
Mine doesn’t seem too bad. It’s a little worse when the keyboard is in the center position vs the left.
Well that’s exactly why I would have prefered them to fix this first. This is a daily nuisance and can’t be fixed with a software update.
I would have prefered waiting 6 months if it made the product as good as it’s supposed to be. Right now, it’s completely inadequate.
Yeah, I hear ya. They couldn’t make us both happy, unfortunately. I’m curious to see where we are with current solutions from support. Will they just send you the flattest pieces they can find? Do they have an incremental improvement they’ll be able to send you, like thicker/stiffer pieces? I realize I’m completely assuming they’re actively working on this, but again, I find it hard to imagine they aren’t.
Yeah, the uneven spacers make the otherwise great product look like a cheap failed Kickstarter project.
Believe it or not, but those spacers are one of the reasons why I’m the only one in my department to use the FL16. One flat deck would be enough for me. Unless this situation is solved, I’m refraining from getting FL16 for my company.
So right now, I’m the only cool guy.
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Just dropping by to say that my batch 4 has spacer issues, but they don’t bother me because:
This is a modular, repairable, and upgradeable laptop. The pieces need to come off.
Sure, a full-size trackpad would look nice and fill the same purpose, but, for me, the purpose of a modular, repairable, and upgradeable laptop outweighs any bump or space on the deck. All in all, the purpose for me of having this laptop was not to have a single full-sized, centered trackpad.
Just my perspective FWIW.
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and yet, even the modular design is failing to cover the full spread of combinations you would reasonably EXPECT to be able to do, such as put the keyboard left aligned, and the trackpad right aligned. or vice versa.
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The arrangement you describe is something I would not expect to be able to do. Have you ever seen any laptop with a track pad right of center with the keyboard on the left? Would it be nice to have the option, sure, but based on how the modules are manufactured, the right lobe on the keyboard starts to interfere with the trackpad itself. If the trackpad was shifted towards the bottom edge by a bit, then they wouldn’t mechanically interfere and in theory you could put the track pad anywhere relative to the keyboard, but the ergonomics of moving the trackpad down like that could be quite poor.
yes. i can’t name models off the top of my head, but they definitely exist.
i’m aware of the issues with how they are designed. that’s why i’m of the opinion it’s flawed; the marketing materials show being able to move the keyboard around, and show being able to move the trackpad around. the logical expectation is they should be able to move independently, and they can, but the restrictions are REALLY specific and weird. like being able to put the trackpad offset in one direction but not the other.
I’m really happy with my FW16 it was worth the money and wait. The one thing that just kept niggling me were the touch pad spacers. Mine arrived (Batch 10) reasonably aligned, but did require some slight bending to get them perfectly flush so my eye would stop being drawn to them. But they do have movement forward and back, I would line up the edge with corners and my (albeit large) hands would push them forward and the corners of the chassis that was exposed has a rough feel. It just felt out of place compared to the build quality of everything else and the niggle continued. I own a 3D printer so I thought what the hell, what have I to lose and tried the trackpad spacer model on printables. What a difference a perfect snug fit and all my niggles have gone away, it is a shame there is play in the shipped parts, if Framework produced a full span touchpad I will purchase it without hesitation as I would always have the trackpad central. I am very happy with my laptop and I know I am pedantic about these things so rather than taking it as a negative I’m taking it as another tick in the box of how useful 3D printers are for solving problems you never thought you would use them for 
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Oh nice, what colour did you go for? Do you have pictures? Sometimes I wish I had a 3D printer.
I just went with black as that was what was already loaded, and at least matched the keyboard spacers and the bezel, but I might try some bright red one’s
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Noob 3D printing question, what’s the best type of 3D printer to get for this particular use case? Does it matter? Assume I know nothing about 3D printing (which is close to true).
I just wanted to add my 2 cents here. I see a lot of people arguing that it’s totally fine because it doesn’t bother them and you can fix it yourself, but I feel like the argument is slightly flawed. I don’t really think we paid $2k+ to fix and tinker with the laptop until it suits our needs; rather, we paid $2k+ so we CAN fix and tinker with the laptop when needed or when we want to do something extra that most people probably wouldn’t need. And something I saw in an LTT clip from their podcast was Linus reacting to LTT’s own review on the laptop and his reaction kind of reflected how I feel.
He reacted to keyboard flex being and issue and it having a very simple solution negatively. It is nice that there is a quick fix, but if it’s so easy to fix, it shouldn’t be a problem in the first place, especially for this price point. I feel like this extends to the spacers having a lot of room to it. It’s nice that it doesn’t bother people and that you can fill in the gaps easily or even EASILY 3D print a spacer that fits properly, but if it’s so easy to fix, shouldn’t it already be fixed out of the box?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still super excited about the laptop and was and still am ready to accept it even with all it’s flaws, but these kind of simple things just don’t seem like they should be a problem. I understand errors in manufacturing like the touchpad being raised, but something that should be an error being accepted as the norm seems wrong to me.
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You can’t go wrong with the Bambu Lab A1 mini, which should be large enough for this.
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Honestly, this thread makes me feel a lot better. I just got my 16 and I’m super happy with it but the bowing in the touchpad module was making me worried I’d done something wrong or somehow didn’t have it seated properly. It doesn’t look 100% the best but I mean I’ve had machines with much gnarlier chassis defects or odd bits before straight from Dell and HP, and it doesn’t really affect my using the laptop at all… That being said, I would not be averse to switching the module out if they revise the design to make it fit a little more nicely later.
I fully agree with this comment. However, I would also like to add that this situation has been handled quite poorly.
For the past 4 years, framework attempted to be a consumer friendly company and so far it has been very visible. When an issue arose, it was admitted and a fix was provided. Even for framework 16 where the company sent some pads to put under the keyboard.
Hence why I do not understand their approach to spacers and whole bottom part of the input deck. This is clearly a design mistake, to be exact - wrong material choice. Aluminium is quite prone to being easy to bend, especially when extremely think and so the bottom modules have serious inaccuracies. Other materials, such as carbon fiber, titanium or even plastic would fix this issue - we can already see that 3D printed fit much better than the original ones.
And this is what makes me a bit unhappy - the fact that framework does not seem to care. The potential fix can be as easy as using some textured plastic and make the whole bottom part of it. Now that we have colorful expansion cards, why cannot we color matched input modules. I am sure some people would prefer plastic with better fit than aluminium with a bad fit.