My company mainly print Draft since we have our Form 3L, we tried some Grey at that time but since the Draft was much faster we went that way.
The initial concept of the Draft resin was a 4x faster time of printing and it was perfect to try our prints faster. and learn to design for 3D printing.
It seems now that with the new V4.1 materials the time gap between the two is much much closer.
For example, a 4h11 print we have in draft is estimated for 6h13 in Grey V4.1 ( In 0.1mm )
Also the mechanical properties of the two materials seems very similar now, at least when we compare draft to White V4.1 (Grey V4.1 is not available to compare on the webstite for the moment)
Considering now that time is not really a factor now (we print maybe 2 times a month and are never short in time) it seems that Grey V4.1 is a better option for low volume printer like us.
I see the following benefit :
Same pricing
No tank degradation overtime ( We had to replace tank that barely had 200h of print time before tank expiration)
Ability to print in 0.05 and 0.025 if needed
We would loose a little bit of print speed and the ability to print at 0.2 but that seems to be it.
Am I missing something here ? Is the Draft resin still relevant for our use case now ?
Thank you for your post.
If the mechanical properties of both resins are close enough for your usecase, Grey V4.1 can be an excellent replacement for Draft.
We’re quite proud of the improvements we’ve made with the resins and due to the fact that the Grey resin got so much better, the gap between the two has indeed shrunk quite a bit.
What matters to a lot of our customers is to get a print done within the workday and then potentially starting a second one end of day, to be repeated the next day.
If your prints fit that bill even in the Grey resin, I’d personally also consider it over the Draft (I personally like the colour quite a bit more).
I personally have used the dental model resin for a similar reason for a lot of my prints on the Form 3: I was able to decrease my layer height to 50µm and not blow up my printing times endlessly (I print a lot of board game accessoires and Tabletop miniatures).
The draft resin is still an excellent one for if you fill the build plate with a lot of models or when you’re printing huge things that wouldn’t finish within a reasonable amount of time in any other resin.