Coming to you a little early this week, we’re excited to already tell you about some cool events going on next week!
On Tuesday, April 21st at 12pm EST, Join Formlabs 3D Model Coordinator, Sofie Belanger, to see how she uses Rhino3D to take our in-house part designs from idea to final product. Sofie will provide an overview of Rhino3D, talk through some parametric design functionalities, and showcase one of her recent projects: designing and printing an engineering assembly. That can be found on our Twitch Stream here.
On Thursday, April 23th at 12pm EST, we’ll be hosting a live Form 3L Deep Dive! Hear directly from our Form 3L team about how they are empowering users to scale in-house print production with the affordable large build volume SLA printer. Join us on April 23rd at 12PM EST as Kyle McNulty, Product Manager at Formlabs, walks through the specs of the 3L and takes questions live. You can register for this free session here.
More information to come soon, but we hope to see your there!
It would be great to hear about how to get our space ready for the 3L and also, because we predict cash will be tight then, what we should have ready for WIP materials cost, and other costs associated with startup.
With our Form 3, we have been able to achieve amazing results with small parts with very fine detail and thin features. Our largest challenge is getting the parts off of the build tray without destroying them. Sometimes parts come off with little to no fuss, but I’ve had rafts so stuck to the tray that it took a hammer and chisel to remove it completely. My company is interested in additional Form 3’s or buying the Form 3L, but not until there is a faster and more reliable process for removing parts from the tray. Maybe a disposable tray? Or a flexible metal tray? A process using heat or cold?
With our Form 3, we mostly had great experiences but one of the hurdles and possibly deterring us from jumping into larger format is the warp that we have seeing in large parts, ie a trim ring in a form of a hexagon of about 1 inch per side and a wall thickness of 2.5 mm shows significant warpage/bow. Any suggestions of how to solve as parts become larger?
Super excited for this @DKirch! Will you guys talk about whether a form cure and wash will be available for the large size?
Also @rafalopezarce warping depends on your material and geometry…but what I’ve found contributes the most to warping is a) how long they sit in IPA for and b) whether the parts have adequate time to dry before peeling supports off and curing. The latter can make a huge difference even if it looks dry by eye. I’ve experienced this recently with Tough 2000 even on small parts.
They will be user-replaceable in case one is faulty and the unit is under pro-service or the spare parts are bought from Formlabs, correct? Formlabs no longer ships a replacement printer.
Is there a calibration procedure to ensure the two laser optics systems are referenced to each other? If there are stitching issues where laser scan paths are supposed to meet, can the user perform a calibration themselves?
In PreForm, can the user have only one laser employed during a build cycle and not the other one? In other words, can the user have control over which laser is assigned to specific parts and to specific contours of particular scan paths such as for large parts?
Will it be possible to import support structures created in third party software like Materialise Magics or NetFabb?
You can already do this by exporting the STL. Preform really should start supporting more file formats. Also for a cheaper alternative, Formware does just as good a job as netfabb and magics for a lot less money.
lasers: