Here is a better tray solution, there are multiple companies using trays like this now. They don’t fog. They last much longer. They are cheaper to replace. They have significantly less peeling force so result in better prints. They have less variation in manufacture. All around they are a better solution.
However these won’t work for the Form1/Form1+ because Formlabs does such a terrible job calibrating their machines and gives the end user no option to adjust the calibration to correct it. Unfortunately on most Form1’s and Form1+'s you would either damage the tray or not get proper adhesion with one of these since they depend on compression of the PDMS to make up for their careless calibration techniques, and these trays do not compress. We could adjust our tray housings ourselves to get the tray to be parallel with the platform, and flush at zero height, however depending on how they calibrate the printers that may cause additional skewing.
$250.00?! For a flimsy disposable poly food tray with a sheet metal frame?! Really??? That, and apparently you still need to replace the liner due to ‘mechanical wear’ (which likely manifests as a whitening of the material where it repeatedly bends…). No gouging or anything going on here, move along…
8"x8"x3/16" plex piece: $2.00
.062" steel stamping: $6.00
10 threaded inserts: $2.00
8"x8"x.0312 thick" polypropylene box: $0.50
calling it ‘super’: $0
saying you’re patenting it: $0
Pretending it’s amazing with a straight face: priceless
They sell the liner alone for $50. So apparently they think the sheet metal and plastic part is worth $200. The guys at Kudo3D make one that is basically just the liner. But that is still $118 for two of them which still seems exohrbitant.
However if you do the math, even with the ridiculous $250 price tag, and the likely also heavily over priced $50 consumable liner. If the liner lasts 5x longer than a PDMS tray then a user who isn’t replacing the PDMS themselves breaks even with the purchase of just the one tray in comparison to Formlabs prices. For each additional liner you use the cost is 1/5 that of the Formlabs official alternative. So while they are clearly gouging the price is still better than what Formlabs suggests.
Couple that with the significant improvements to print quality thanks to the significant decrease in peel forces and one could argue that relative to Formlabs it might be nice to have a company gouge us lIke that.
Their site says it lasts 10 times longer so in theory you’d make your money back pretty quickly. Sure they sound like they’re definitely “capitalizing” with the initial price but like you said if the liners last as long as they do it is a good solution.
For instance I just swapped tanks on my printer to go back to white resin and of the 3 tanks I had in storage 2 of them were completely broken because of that stupid pour corner weak point.
I know this is going to sound like I work for the company or something (I don’t) but don’t pretend any company on the planet sells their product for the cost of raw goods. You’re completely ignoring labor and markup which is pretty basic stuff.
For a flimsy disposable poly food tray with a sheet metal frame?! Really??? That, and apparently you still need to replace the liner due to ‘mechanical wear’ (which likely manifests as a whitening of the material where it repeatedly bends…). No gouging or anything going on here, move along…