I run a couple of form 3s and a form 3L. A bit of investment a while back and of course I want to get as much life out of it as possible. I had been wondering what the actual difference between the form 3 and 4 materials is beyond a significant saving in the material cost. Well I happened to come across a bottle of version 5 clear resin and thought I would throw it through my form 3 to see what happens. Print settings were set to 4.1 and the V5 was decanted into an empty cartridge with an empty tank in the printer.
The results? No difference. Parts printed as expected. So i’m now left wondering why i should bother paying the premium for the form 3 materials (beyond needing a new cartridge now and again unless I reprogram them). I’m curious if anyone else has experimented with any other materials and what the results were.
And yes I’m sure there will be a formlabs employee along in a moment to tell me that it’s all wrong and there’s significant difference
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Hi @Gary_Cairns
you called?
You’re doing it all wrong and there is a significant difference.
Jokes aside:
I’m happy you got the Clear V5 material working on the Form 3.
As long as the resin properly cures, you will get the same technical properties out of it as if you were using it on a Form 4, we just can’t guarantee that. The General Purpose Resins V4.1 are our middle ground for getting “better resin” onto the Form 3.
Believe me, making just one formulation for every resin instead of two (or in some cases even 3 with legacy resins), would be so much easier for us and we’d love to bring V5 resins to Form 3, unfortunately it’s not just about “working”, but working consistently, with tight enough tolerances, low failure rates, without eating up tanks so on and so forth. Lots of challenges from getting a couple cartridges working to getting it working on thousands of machines.
What you’re missing out on is the automatic resin handling, the print speed, the repairability, tank longevity etcetc. all those nice things that we improved upon with the Form 4 compared to the Form 3.
What you will run into are cartridge issues as your Form 3 cartridge will lock up after a certain amount of resin passing through it (around 2,5L if I remember correctly).
One of the big reasons for this are the bite valves used in the cartridges, they can only take so many compressions before giving up, rupturing or loosening and falling off.
Back in the day of the Form 2 release, we had a few customers with Form 1+ resin bottles, who bought a singular cartridge for their Form 2, refilled it with their bottles and ended up with ruined printers. After RMAing a few printers because of this, we added the cartridge lockout to the printers and cartridges.
Apart from that there are people using non-Formlabs resins on our machines. For this you’d usually need the Open Material Mode. Mostly it’s research institutions who are making their own resins and use our printers for it, rather than customers who want to use a specific resin from a third party.
Kind regards
Jakob
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Well that confirms what I suspected. Having to tip a few hundred ml into a tank now and again isn’t a bother. Useful to know for the future.
@Gary_Cairns thanks for sharing this because I have a Form 2 and Form 3L. Please continue to share if you have any new information; I’d really appreciate it.
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No one talk about it, because: we know they know we know 
Designing completely new resins for new printer is not financially efficient.
Afternoon,
I guess the issue here is that FL have removed the ability for us to “tinker”. We should be allowed to do what we want with the machines as we own them, not FL, and I do take exception at tank “lifetimes”, I have some which are thousands of % over-life, and still work fine. If they leak, then this is my problem, not yours. (I have never had a tank failure on my 3LB’s and I run 7 different materials.
As far as locking out the cartridges, well the same applies to them, I have never had a bite valve fail (I have dozens of spares) as I remove these from the cartridges FL makes me put in land fill! The true reason is to sell more consumables, which is where the money is, HP worked this out 40 odd years ago with ink-jet cartridges. 5L of Grey V4 is ÂŁ600 here in the UK, yet you still offer an open license for a paltry ÂŁ5K (notice the sarcasm here).
I so wish FL would treat the FL community with some respect, rather than just as a source of income. At some point your pricing and licensing (and general we don’t care what you think attitude, you’re just the customer) will drive away your loyal customers, I even found myself, a big and long term FL “fan”, looking at the Phrozen products just yesterday, as they are actually very good and 20% of the price for the Form 4L machine and you can run whatever resin you want!
I also run Stratasys FDM machines, just ask them what happens to a company share price with disaffected customers.
I’m sure most on the forum can understand where I’m coming from, and I so very rarely put anything “out there”, so you really must have pissed me off.
I think if you put all the effort that you currently put into protecting your IP into looking after the needs of your customers (and actually listened!), you might actually grow your market share, rather then let it dwindle away.
Thanks
regards
Chris
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