Hatch Pattern

Support & Troubleshooting
1

I can see what are supposed to be the exterior and interior paths in Preform (I really like this feature!). What I’m wondering is if formlabs can share any info on what hatch scheme they are using and why there is only one option (other SLA machines typically offer a few choices)? I’m trying to increase my resolution to 25um and running into the same issues as others here with adhesion to the bottom, except the gray setting isn’t working very well for me.

2

I’m not sure what you call “hatch pattern”, are you referring to the infill structure/pattern?

The Main difference between Form1 (or any stereolithography/sintering for that mater) and FDM (extrusion of plastic) is that you have to cure everything inside solids, otherwise if you where only curing hexagons you would end-up with pockets of uncured resin trapped inside the object.

When you extrude plastic and add layers on layers you can leave air gaps and use less material.

With the form1, you would have to create the shell yourself and add an escape hole to flush the resin.

(see: http://support.formlabs.com/entries/23774367-Shell-prints-and-escape-hole)

It would be a nice to have this function in Preform, but I guess it’s not their priority for the moment.

Also the software cannot know were to place the hole so that would require some manual intervention…

Cheers

3

After playing around with a number of different photopolymer resins is that the settings -

Preform ->

* (settings ) ->

Materials ->

Clear 0.025mm

Clear 0.05mm

Clear 0.1mm

do not work for the clear resin supplied by FormLabs ?

The other colored resins I’ve tried work OK, but the Preform needs to have control of the LASER (dwell and intensity settings) to be truly useful…

Best regards,

-jay-

John (jay) H. Morewood
Owner / CTO / Rapid Prototyping Engineer
+1 408.839.4252
www.Zip-Bit.com

4

Good day John,

Have you tried different photopolymer on the Form1 already, or are you talking about your experience en general with different printers?

In any case your experience is very valuable for everyone, especially if you have advice like:

  • accuracy VS settings / Material VS physical properties

  • aging / post process / painting

  • supply and cost

  • …

As for the setting in Preform, it’s all closed and Formlabs is apparently not ready to open the protocols… There is a request from Broken toy to get access to more setting though, maybe you should add some of your requests there?

http://support.formlabs.com/entries/24062756-Software-Editable-material-files-

Cheers

5

I have tried both B9R-1-RED Resin and FormLabs Clear on both the B9Creator and the Form1 - I can get both resins to work on the B9Creator at the finest settings but not the Form1

Best regards,

-jay-

John (jay) H. Morewood
Owner / CTO / Rapid Prototyping Engineer
+1 408.839.4252
www.Zip-Bit.com

6

Hey Jay, did you ever resolve this?

7

We’re constantly tweaking our material settings to get better performance – make sure you’re using the latest version of the software (http://formlabs.com/software) – as we’ve been making some tweaks in these arenas.