Hi, I am extremely disappointed with castable purple. I can’t get it to cast correctly. I purchased my form3 about 2 months ago and I almost wish I went with another brand. My goal was to go from print to casting with near perfect results, without all this extra jazz of adding oxygen to the furnace and all those extra recommendation.
All that said, I’m forced to turn away from formlab resins.
So Bluecast x10 seems very promising. Can the community help me set up my form3 to print with bluecasts x10? Is this possible with near perfect results every time? Am I way to wishful or is this achievable? Help me please…
This is a really interesting and burning question. I also bought the Form 3 for a purple resin print with further casting, but I ended up using almost the entire resin cartridge, a couple of bags of molding material and only got 100% disappointment.
One can start by saying that Form 3 prints this resin very poorly. Geometric (flat) products have a very poor surface, but even this is not the worst, since the main reason is that I could not completely burn out this resin even at a temperature of 950 degrees Celsius. I kept the flask at this temperature for 3 hours.
After these experiments, I bought a “PHOTON Mono” printer on Aliexpress for 200 euros and used Blucast10 resin. Yes, this printer has its own problems when printing, but they are predictable, since these are problems associated with the technology of illumination of the entire layer at once and they can be predicted. But the resin has shown itself from a very good side, both in printing and in casting. Even if not all of my castings are perfect, the photo shows a ring that weighs 40 grams and it spilled out of silver just perfect. I would really like Formlabs to come to terms with its ambitions in the development of resin for jewelers and, together with Blucast, developed a resin and a mode for Form 3, then I would be pleased with the purchase of this printer, but at the moment I would not advise my friends to do this the same mistake I made by purchasing this printer.
The key problem of Formlabs for the jewelry industry is the lack of fine-resolution due to the laser beam size and also the peeling mechanism for each layer. I mean for some big size prints, it is good enough. But when you talk about a small ring or earring at this level, the so-called 25um of XY resolution from Form3 is far worse than a 47um XY resolution from a cheap LCD printer.
Also, I don’t think Formlabs has the interest to step into the jewelry industry. In another way, the current Form3 printer printing resolution is good enough for Formlabs to jump into the dental industry which is way bigger in market size compared to 3D printing in the jewelry industry.
If you are a jeweler, I would recommend getting a DLP or LCD printer instead of a SLA printer.
The plane on the side of the supports is always uneven, missing. For this reason, you will never get a good print at an angle to the platform (as the automatic support setting suggests).
yes this is the greatest problem of form 3 that the support side is ugly, uneven and not to use …in the next days i became a Frozen Sonic mini 4k for 329€ , ten times cheaper as the form3!!!
Why did the support team nothing say about this problem on form3!!! what is the solution???
We’ll have more to share tomorrow - be sure to sign up for our launch announcement! We will be live with Patrick Diggins from the jewelry team, and able to take your questions.
It’s been almost three years since we have been troubles with the terrible results for casting with the purple formlabs resin and the company has not responded correctly. It is incredible low cost printers can offer better results due their compatibility with bluecast resins and formlabs just offer only expensive 3d printers with terrible quality resins.
Thank you for sharing your feedback - we understand your frustration and we want to be able to do better in this department. Have you reached out to our support team via a support case about these issues recently? I see that this thread is on the older side - at this time, the team has been refining their troubleshooting for these applications.
Of course I have contacted support team. In my country they are resellers and only focus on the benefits of your printing quality nor the casting results. Resellers have no training. They offered me to use the blue resin promising better results. It was much worse than the purple one. The Formlabs resins just do not accomplish the minimum requirements that the jewelry industry needs. This lack of responsibility causes serious problems during the casting process. Among other incidences, your clients face waste of time, replacement of 3d printing models for wax molds, errors caused by the resin incorrect melting, waste of precious metals and materials, and unacceptable results for the final product. It is just about quality, not support teams tickets.
Have you wondered why all this people is asking how to use a third party resin? It is frustrating having an expensive printer and terrible resins. Please improve your products. Offer better services or at least open a third party resins compatibility for your printers. No excuses no evasions.
Thank you for taking the time to share this feedback and context.
Your frustration is valid - the reason I wanted to check about contacting our support team is that they would be doing due diligence on their end to help troubleshoot quality issues - the results of the troubleshooting would be passed to the team to help refine the resins. I understand that this is not apparent presently due to your current results, and we want to do better and improve our products for our users like you.
No excuses and evasions here - I wanted to get a scope of what was done on our end so we are able to fine tune our approach. We hear you and do listen to this feedback, and while the results may not be instant, they do get considered.
