I occasionally use Photocentric firm grey UV on FL Grey V.2 settings doing the cartridge refilling thing for non-critical parts that are big. They historically have been slightly over-exposed so I avoid projects where dimensions are critical. I’ve only had one instance where cracking occurred a year or so back. I put that down to elevated temperature exposure as I used it for a mould from which I was producing waxes.
Apart from the technical arguments of not wanting to allow the heater and wiper when using third party resins, there are obvious commercial ramifications. Here in the U.K., the photocentrics resin is 1/3rd the price of FL. We also have a big Photocentrics LC-Pro which of course uses their daylight resins. Not to be confused.
Grey V.3 is great resin, but economically, its a disaster for big non-critical prints.
The out-of-box printing and solid foundation Formlabs has built. My FDM printer is a Robo3D R1 Plus and it is a bit of a temperamental machine. I wanted to get a nice, reliable machine for my first SLA. I learned a lot from getting hands on with electronics and modifying scripts, but I don’t want to have to just to get a reliable printer. I wasn’t overly excited about a DIY SLA (Moai). Now that Matterhackers has picked them up and offer assembled ones, I’m kinda kicking myself. For some reason $1200 goes to $2,000 for it being assembled.
Was checking out the direct castable resins on your web site. Can you tell me the difference (besides price) between Waxy, DCS and DCH and which would be available as ready to print for Form1+ ?
The resins are designed for different customer requirements and uses.
All of our resins are ready to print with Formlabs printers.
Its probably best to email 3Dresyns (3dresyns@3dresyns.com) to ask for advice as to which best suits your particular casting requirements. That will ensure you get the best possible for your individual need
I will be helping my business partner build his this weekend.
I have enjoyed applylabworks resin in open mode but I now have found in closed. mode using a different profile it will mess up the silicone and cause it to leak. Caught it twice. So far both used tanks but there is no way it would happen this early if the heat wasn’t involved.
I tell you what Formlabs will really lose me if they keep holding out on these long term tanks these units need to have been available day one. This company is no longer a start up and customers that are using their prosumer machines no longer can wait for new announced products.
That alone may make me jump ship if this business practice continues.
almost 2k of my money is in limbo as I wait. This is after I have already spent 4k. 5 years after being established I feel is ridiculous
Totally agree with you. As for the vats, I’ve not tried mine yet and I’ve not read about anyone else having PDMS issues from closed mode testing. I don’t have any cartridges to run it in closed mode either. Hopefully open mode is a success.
Yeah my experience has been pretty bad just glad I’ve caught it. Honestly if sitting without heat issue may still occur. I was on vacation for 6 days and it just sat i came back home and found it starting to bubble. Not as bad as before but still bubbling and now unusable. This is a Vat that i purchased from Formlabs and have ran about 1.8 liters through
The Bucktown polymers EP200 -V420 S (slow) version is only $25/Kg. It’s available with our without dye. We have sent a few people extra dye and reducer for tuning with the Formlabs printers but they have never gotten back to us with their results or ratios.
We typically sell in 200Kg drums and sometimes 20Kg pails. We offer the EP200 in smaller 4Kg cans at the 200Kg drum price. We have only received a few inquiries from people on this forum about having it include a UV blocker. You may obtain the same results by just adding more dye to tune the slope.
We offer it in the primary colors of Cyan, Magenta and Yellow so that users may blend them to obtain just about any final color. If you search for info on process color you’ll see how this works in the printing industry.
There can be found a lot of test prints in this thread using buck town resin. The problem still seems to be the curing. If I remember correct, as soon as you have XY curing OK with an UV-blocker, the cure depth is still too deep.
I did buy a gallon of BP polymer material a while ago. I found that we need either an opaque pigment or light blocker to control the cure depth. The 200mW laser on the Form 2 provides way too much cure depth without some kind of blocker.
Once it was tuned in for cure depth the material worked pretty well for small to medium sized parts. It’s fairly hard and would work great for small game figures and parts that don’t see a lot of abuse. The detail was really good with pigment and blocker. I liked the fact that it had very little odor.
To be honest I didn’t try much in the way of big parts. I was only mixing 250mL at a time when I tuned things in. I also didn’t want to deal with the whole pause fill and resume feature of open mode.
I also saw that there was little if any PDMS wear with that resin. Even when it was over cured.
Good to hear on the reset tool. Now I’ll have to dig around for the bite valve information. If we replace the bite valve every couple of liters I think the tanks will be good for a long time.
The grey v3 setting for Moai grey seems to be better than black v1 setting as the print has less shrinkage. Probably because V3 has heater activated. more test is needed but I really dig the surface finish.
The EP200-V420 Slow is formulated for low cost applications where the main requirement is that it cures. If it was more flexible it would be rougher on the PDMS due to increased adhesion.
