Good afternoon, has anyone tried the Formlabs 4 SLA resin in a Formlabs 3 machine?
At £50 cheaper does it work in Form 3 printers?
Hi Chris,
While it may still technically still print, the Form 4 resins were reformulated to take advantage of the new Form 4 print engine. This means that you will not achieve the same validated material properties, print success rates, aesthetics, or accuracy because the power output of the Form 3 print engine is fundamentally different in the way that it cures resin.
Additionally, you would still need to purchase Open Material Mode for Form 3 to print with anything other than Form 3 resins. So in my opinion, just not worth the hassle.
That being said, the Form 3 resins have also been slightly reformulated from V4 to V4.1, to bring some of the aesthetics of the V5 resins to Form 3 users.
Thank you so much.
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Sort of.
I was in a pinch and ran out of clear on my Form 3. The print was almost finished. I poured Form 4 resin into the empty cartridge just to have a little bit of resin in the cartridged. It worked. The last few layers were noticeably different and the resin in the tank ended up with a lot of bubbles. Not sure if that’s due to the mix, but I emptied the tank. It was enough of an experience to convince me that I would probably be asking for trouble to try it any further.
You mentioned the last few layers were noticeably different, was the quality of these layers bad? or just different from the previously printed resin? I’m thinking about trying this myself but with a full print. It’d be great to potentially avoid paying double the cost for resins.
There were bubbles in the print. Plus V4 is noticeably yellow.
I wouldn’t recommend it unless you were desperate.