After a print finishes washing, it’s still covered in IPA or TPM and needs time to air dry or be manually blown off before it can be cured. This introduces delay, mess, and risk of inconsistent results—especially with enclosed or complex geometries.
What if the Form Wash included a simple, passive drying mechanism?
Concept:
A PTC-heated airflow system (think: low-voltage resistive element with no control logic) paired with a filtered laminar/turbulent fan that lightly blows warm, clean air across the washed part. The goal isn’t to bake the part or dry instantly, but to gently and rapidly evaporate wash solvent in a matter of seconds or a minute, without needing separate equipment.
Potential Benefits:
Fast transition from wash to cure – no waiting for air dry or manual IPA-blowdown.
No complex electronics – PTCs self-regulate to a fixed temperature (e.g., 45–60°C).
Filtered airflow – optional HEPA or particulate filter ensures no dust during drying.
Drop-in simplicity – a fan and a heating element. That’s it.
Could require reworking the backplate structure to allow airflow channels without sacrificing rigidity. Might slightly raise the manufacturing costs of the Wash unit, but the uniformity of finish could be awesome.
Hi @cwarris! Any heating element near a wash would make me nervous, but I agree that even passive air would help, since using compressed air or placing the parts in front of a fan usually speed up that process a LOT. But this is great feedback! I will definitely pass this onto our RD team
In my opinion the Form Cure is the one which should have an integrated drying stage. It has all the necessary parts to implement a dehydration cycle, it just needs some software /frmware changes.
I agree that having a heater in a machine that has IPA is potentially dangerous.
The Form Cure (2nd Generation) does have a drying cycle! You can find it in Settings>Drying and select how many minutes you want it to dry your part for before the heating and curing cycles begin.
I have a beta unit of the Form Cure and it looks like this feature doesn’t exist on my machine. Also can’t seem to update or confirm a newer FW release
If someone else uses it, please tell me how it works out. I remember suggesting this during the beta but at the time it didn’t sound like the machine had been designed to dehydrate.
If it’s just circulating hot air inside with the fan and there’s no exhaust of the moist air, that won’t really work - but maybe there has been an update that’s achieved this!
@henryqiu I can see why any old heating element would make someone nervous around flamable materials, which is why I’d specifically recommending looking in to PTC ceramic heating elements. These are semiconductors which can be manufactured to spec, and are generally inexpensive.
For instance BaTiO3 (Barium Titanate) can be doped with Strontium, Calcium, and/or Lanthanum to drop the Curie temperature. Essentially you can tune the stable state of voltage/temperature via solid state chemistry - the hotter the element gets, the less current flows. It’s a non-linear effect, so it can ramp up very fast to the desired temperature and then fall off quickly. They use this in milk warmers for babies, for instance, as well as medical devices. It’s fail-safe by physics, not software. Combine it with a zenar diode, and you can shunt excess voltage away from the heating element, giving very reliable performance even in failure modes - and with the low voltages in devices like these, you don’t even need to worry about it literally breaking in half, because that’ll just reduce it’s total power output.
People on here way overblow how dangerous IPA is honestly. It catches fire and burns rapidly, but it doesn’t explode or spontaneously combust, but they way people talk about it someone who hasn’t handled the stuff would think its basically nitro glycerin.
We’ve used some of the cheap hand-held duster fans (rechargeable), to blow off parts in production.. This greatly speeds things up - as it only takes 2-3 minutes to do an entire batch of parts (50-100pc of small parts).
The downside is that it’s neither automated nor hassle-free (small parts blow around the room easily if not caged).
for those getting fidgety around IPA and heat, cool yer jets. you’re more likely to catch gasoline on fire…
From ~ 2012-2016, we ran ultrasonic cleaning baths FILLED with IPA, at 60C.
not a single fire. EVER.
Fair to say the dangers of alcohol in general is blown out of proportion… But the alternative is people not realize that a 1oz spill of IPA in the right spot can start a fire that will indeed burn down a city block. Is it going to kill you instantly? absolutely not. But it’s a conformal ignition source that can easily find it’s way in to higher energy density areas that have are typically safe because they don’t get hot, make it just hot enough, and start a cascade of destruction. Does that happen often? Probably not. But that might be because people are overly cautious.
Spilling IPA on to an outlet that has a short could start a fire in your wall that’s difficult to stop… But spilling a bucket of it in a parking lot and intentionally lighting it on fire… That’s… probably not gonna do much.
