I bought a used form1 a couple of weeks ago. It came with a bottle of applylabswork white resin. Ran a couple of prints with what was left in the bottle after getting a new resin tray and cleaning everything. Those came out great, not one issue. I ran out so I ordered a bottle of expert gray from them. When I ran out I completely cleaned the build platform and resin tray with ipa and pec pads.
It arrived yesterday and I printed out a test rook and it came out kinda gunky but I thought it was because it was printed very small. Started one of the same models I had printed out with the white just to compare it. Ill attach pictures of it. I changed the settings in preform to be gray v2 which is the newest update available in preform 2.2. Ran it overnight and came back to this mess. Layers are skewed, nothing is circular. After that I sifted out the resin with a comb then I printed out a half inch cube as a test and it came out even worse. Wondering if anyone could help me out with this. I was so happy with the results of the first resin.
Mangaged to get a cube with decent surface finish. I had to rotate it to get it to do that. Its not a cube though trapezoidal prism is more accurate of a description.
Hi @Nelsoneaton01, thanks for reaching out. A Form 1 - nice find!
What’s happening essentially is that the Print settings for Grey v2 are not optimized for the ApplyLabswork. Unfortunately because of the non-Formlabs material and the age of your machine we don’t have additional guidance or validation on materials outside of ours.
You’ll have a better chance using our materials (Grey v4) which would be more closely optimized to Form 1, but again, based on providing the best tech possible, we’ve optimized our resin settings to the Form 3 and Form 4.
Thanks for sharing your learning curve, and we’d love to keep learning as you ask and share along the way!
Does it sound reasonable that its sticking to the pdms layer more than say a formlabs resin therefore causing the build plate to move around. Creating a difference in placement of the build plate relative to the laser. Layers seem to move around at random. It looks pretty good when they line up. Just wondering if you could point me to the correct screws to tighten to try and get a more rigid printer
Yup, thinking about trying modeling resin instead of the “tough” resin. The previous bottle i had was modeling white from applylabworks and was flawless. The peel sounds incredibly rough with this resin. Going to also try a printingl using the “tough” or whatever formlabs calls it setting to see if it can account for that. Unsure of how that will work for me. Thinkign of selling it and buying an lcd printer just so i can buy cheaper resin. Not a business user, this is kinda just for fun. Dont know how that will fix the scaling issue that popped up as well when switching resin.
It’s a shame to see a company abandon products that still work.
There are many lcd printers that are quite affordable and they have come a long way from the Wanhao D7 I had. They are higher resolution as well as faster printing machines and the resin is much cheaper. If you aren’t making money on the prints, it’s really hard to justify using formlabs material, especially if they don’t directly support the material profiles that you can’t adjust.
Yeah really having trouble sinking anymore money into this thing given the fact it probably wont be able to do anything in a couple of years. Seems financially responsible to switch to phrozen
Well ive got a postive update. Did some playing around and managed to get a usable part out of the “tough” preset in preform. Seems like this is more similar to the tough resin than the grey. Surface finish still isnt flawless though. Will have to give applylabworks white modeling a try again.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the resin settings in preform and how the Formlabs ecosystem works. The settings in preform are specifically for Formlabs resin and are not going to transfer well to other materials. On newer systems you have to pay extra for an open materials license to properly calibrate for non formlabs resins.
The resin settings in preform are not pick “grey” if you have a grey resin. And the polymers used in tough resins are drastically different than model resins so its not surprising you had issues. If you continue to use various different resins you will have to do a lot of research and fine tuning to get them to play nicely.
