I wanted to share a quick experience with Formlabs Tough 1500 after a recent trip through the Chihuahua Desert. Before leaving, I designed a windscreen mount for my LiveWire One and needed a set of small aluminum brackets to bolt it to the bike. My machinist couldn’t get them made in time, so I mocked up a version in Fusion360 and printed them on my Form 4 using Tough 1500 as a temporary solution.
After 3800 miles of transport and 700 miles in the desert
Before the trip. Front part of the mount is PETG (right component in pic), backing is tough 1500 with a dollop of black spray paint (left component with bolts sticking through).
I tested the brackets with M6 bolts and they felt surprisingly solid, but I still didn’t totally trust them. The day before I left, the aluminum versions finally showed up in the mail. I packed them in my bag as backups, assuming the printed parts wouldn’t survive the combination of long-distance transport and off-road abuse.
Fast forward: the printed brackets made it through 3800 miles in the back of a truck (completely exposed to wind), then another 700 miles of extremely rough riding—washboard roads, loose sand, big temperature swings, direct sunlight, and constant vibration from the rear wheel.
They’re still intact. Not loose, not cracked, not warped.
I’ll still ship the windscreen kit with aluminum brackets for now, just because I don’t know how long the printed ones will last long-term and the aluminum parts are costly to make. But I keep finding myself impressed by how well Formlabs’ tougher resins hold up in real-world, mechanical applications. I had other prints on this trip in different resins that didn’t survive, and I’ll post about those separately. In this case though, I’m convinced that if I had printed everything in a tough resin, those parts would’ve held up too.
Just wanted to throw this out there for anyone who assumes resin is only for tiny miniatures or fragile parts. Tough 1500 surprised me.