Evening all, first post here. I was a matter of hours away from biting the bullet on a Form 4, plus wash + cure… until I started to read the myriad of threads on here from ‘24 and early ‘25, relating to poor dimensional accuracy performance of the Form 4, in particular with ‘functional’ type geometry, i.e. enclosures, housings, brackets etc.
My use case is absolutely simple geometric components (jigs, fixtures, enclosures etc), and as such this served as an immediate, huge red flag for me that for now has halted my decision.
However, these threads were as I say, not recent.
Can any current Form 4 owners add anything to the discussion on this? My use cases primarily demand General purpose Grey, Tough 1500, Tough 2000, and Rigid 10K resins.
There are going to be some learning curves with any new technology and alot of the early issues have been fixed or solutions have been found we have had tons of accurate parts print and very rarely are any super dimensionally off. When we find that issue, we usually just have to adjust the angle of the part or support locations but we’ve yet to run into a job we cant eventually print on the Form 4.
Thanks Matt, really interesting. In your first image, the clear part - it appears to be grossly warped along the vertical edge, is that just a visual artefact in the photo?
some parts we ran straight up and down had some squishing issues due to cupping and we found tilting solved that issue. the geometries are great we have some jobs that mix Formlabs with MJF printed parts and FDM parts and everything lined up and matched perfectly Ill try to show you some examples in a few.
Our general use of Form 4 systems is biomed parts production - we make anywhere from 50-350 parts per day on 3 Form 4 units. today we made around 250 parts, and another 400 will run over the weekend. Most of these are telescopic sliding tubes - 1-3” long, ranging from .375-.485” diameter, with .008-.010” match-up tolerance. So the variance could probably work within .003-.005” slop on them.
We had 2 parts fail this week, both due to operator error.
Zero parts failed due to system quality or geometric issues.
The biggest issue I’ve experienced - probably piggybacking on Matt here - proper supports and proper setup. there’s just a bit of learning one needs to get into doing proper orientation and preparation.
My opinion: these are the closest you’re going to get to a production system, short of $200,000…
each of the Form 4 printers paid for itself in the first month. one in the first week.
Thanks everybody for the replies. We had our local distributor print some sample parts direct from .FORM files we configured, of parts previously produced using MJF - and were so pleased with the results we ordered the Form 4, due to arrive today.
I’ll update this thread with much more detail when I get the chance.
