Beam Intensity and feed rate of different resins

Put a request in to the Feature Requests and Ideas section. The more something gets asked for the more likely we’ll get it.

Hi Scott,

Thanks for the posts here and thanks for the information that you sent us. I am sorry it’s taken some time for us before posting here, but we are incredibly busy!! Which is good. Our growth has been such that we are in the middle of building a second factory and development facility on a fantastic 3 hectare site located just outside Barcelona.

Reviewing the emails between yourself and us, I can see that you never gave any clues on the orientation of your part when you printed it on the Form2. We asked for that information as it is exceptionally important on such a small part. Your part is basically a tube with a hole running through it. The hole diameter is 0.080" (2.02mm) and it runs through a length of 1.18" (30mm)

We never had any reply from you with response to that question.

We asked you how you measured the diameter of that printed hole - your reply was:

“The hole should be .08”, but when printed 0.065" is about the largest bit that will fit through. I printed with FormLabs tough, and 0.075" will fit most of the way, with one spot at about 0.07". It’s not too bad, I can work with that."

Your method of measurement was not very accurate, an engineer would tell you that a drill bit will not achieve a high precision hole size, and normally to get the degree of precision that you seem to require, a second process is needed to finish a hole to size (such as reaming)

Orientation of the print part and the resolution of the printer will also impact on the tolerance of the finished hole size. A 2mm hole through 30mm depth of material is a tough demand on the Form2 printer.

It’s a tough demand on any printer design, let’s assume (for arguments sake) the actual X/Y resolution on the Form2 printer is 80um

With that resolution Your 2.02mm hole can vary in size (due to the x/y resolution) by =/- 0,04mm so it can range in size from 2.06 to 2.018mm simply by variations due to the x/y resolution, equally that will have an effect on the roundness of the hole. Those variations are around 6% and are simply down to the printer resolution.

I am sorry, but your method of measurement was not very accurate and claiming that our resin (or Formlabs own resin) has overgrown by 7 - 15% is very misleading to people.

We supply fine tuning additives to help people maximise the functionality in our resins for difficult prints like your design, but even with that you cannot expect miracles!!

If you would like to chat to us off Forum then we can happily suggest printers that are capable of printing with sub micron resolution and are used with our resins without complaint. I suspect that you would not like the price of those printers (you would buy many Form2 printers for the price of one of the sub micron resolution printers)

Our resins are at least as good as Formlabs own - even with the obvious restrictions of only being usable on a Form2 in “Open” mode. Had we access to the same printer functionality as the Formlabs own resins, then our resins would beat Formlabs by a very, very long way. Access to the heater and wiper and access to the exposure profiles would stop 3rd Party resin manufacturers having to compete in a race where one person is allowed to run with all the help possible, yet the other competitors have to run blindfolded and with their legs tied together.

If you were Formlabs would you want to allow competitors to run in such a race without restricting them?

Regards

The team at 3Dresyns.

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I was printing the part 30 degrees from vertical, which I believe I said early on in the emails.

The piece was chosen specifically to highlight overgrowth I believed I was seeing. I never expected it to come out perfectly matching the design spec. And it does highlight overgrowth. As shipped to me, your blue UHT resin was more overgrown than formlabs tough at 0.1 mm layer height. My statement regarding percentages was accurate for my part, but you’re right it’s misleading. The difference is few tenths of a mm, which is probably constant regardless of the size of the part.

At 0.05 mm layer height, the overgrowth much more difficult to detect. So I either have the choice of adding LB1 to fix 0.1 mm, or I can just print at 0.05. Adding too much LB1 seems to cause tear-offs with larger parts, so I’ve chosen to just print at 0.05, and am having good success.

As I mentioned in my last email, I am good for now. I’m happy with your resins and plan to continue using them.

And yes, I believe the way FormLabs has implemented Open mode is so they can market their printers as “open”, while in reality protecting their own ecosystem and discouraging competitors.

For that I’m disappointed and a bit mistrusting of FormLabs.

do you happen to have this chart downloaded. I am looking all over for it and it is 404 :smiling_face_with_tear:

hey, do you mind sharing this chart if you still have it? Please