Hi @Martin_Hill
Ok, so here is my opinion based on my experience working with the machine:
Printing large flat surfaces with squared or perpendicular sides on all sides is very much impossible and trust me, I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong here. I have made some good progress which allows me to print “decent enough” enclosures but this involves printing directly on to the buildplatform. Any other orientation for larger flat surfaces with squared corners and perpendicular sides is pretty much not going to happen.
Now, for printing directly onto the build platform, that seems to work to the point where I have clients that are happy with the result and prepared to pay for those. The question is, “am I satisfied?” and the answer to that is unfortunately “No”. That said, maybe my expectations of this machine and the process was simply too high.
It is worth noting that I have only been printing with standard resins as ANY other resin is just too expensive locally due to whatever reason. From what I have read in the forum though, if you are not able to get what you want from Standard Resin in terms of the “shape”, you will almost certainly not get it from any other material as they are more challenging to work with. Almost like Standard resins are the PLA of resin printers.
@DKirch Formlabs was going send me a liter of one or other engineering resin to test, but to date, I have not received anything.
I have attached some pictures of the print a did for a client. The part in BLUE is FDM print done on my Ultimaker printer (due to cost constraints). The grey part was printer with Standard V5 resin and the Early layer adhesion settings were adjust to reduce the “elephant’s foot” effect. The plus side of printing this way is ut uses A LOT less materials for support. The arrow indicates the side that was printed on the build platform.
These were printed vertically on the build platform so I can get ±10 in one print. So here is where it does shine… It took me 3 days to print, wash and cure the SLA parts for entire order on Formlabs, and 5 weeks to do the FDM parts. Also if you are using M3 or bigger screws, you will be able to print threads that actually work ok, not need for inserts.
If you do decide to pull the trigger and buy a Form4, buy the flexible build platform for sure. It will make your life a whole lot easier. Here they are simply too expensive, so I am using a scraper with a VERY thin blade to remove parts (not the one that comes with the printer, it will damages the corners).
One last thing… if you are printing large flat parts, DO NOT cure them using any heat. As tempting as the improve structural integrity might be when curing for 15 minutes it 65C, you will get parts that warp like hell. I made the mistake with these, so ended up curing for 10mins at 35C.
Hope this helps, let me know if you have any further questions.
One very last thing: The hinges on the lid are nice, but mine failed about a month in. Be sure to report that that to Formlabs in case it happens. They offer the parts to repair this at no charge, unfortunately as with the resin, I have not received mine yet. So for the past couple of months, I had to prop mine up while inserting/removing the platform which a a pain in the butt.
Now to sum it all up:
I have made peace with the fact that I will use this mostly for prototyping and small batch prints of small parts. Small parts are easy and print really nice. For larger runs or when near-perfect quality is needed, I will most likely outsource to JLC mainly due to the fact that they finish the prints with media blasting (which I do not have) to remove any support marks and layer lines (yes you will see those on large flat surfaces). Also their printers are huge so they can print larger parts in one go. I did try to print the part attached in two prints on my Form4, but the result was disastrous and they all (20) broke VERY easily during shipping (standard resin).
The black one was done on my machine and then spray painted to hide the layer lines. The white one was form JLC (neater finish, single print and cheaper)
Regards, Friedl!!