I thought it would be interesting to hear everyone’s opinions on which resin they trust the most for holding tight tolerances, thin walls, crisp features, and small details etc.
In my opinion I have the least success with durable, and have had the most success with clear. I haven’t tried grey pro yet and dont have enough experience with white rigid yet to comment.
i just started printing a couple months ago, after reading the forums about resins, I made the choice to go with clear I heard it froths less and its more durable.
so far clear has been amazing, firm and strong and captures the details well.
Of the standard resins, clear has been great for me as well. Prints accurately and cleans up nicely. Black V3 has also been pretty reliable, but I haven’t heard many good things about Black V4. White V4 has been “eh” - not super accurate, the supports often leave pock marks and even after curing it’s kind of a soft yet brittle material to work with. Also find the White V4 degrades the standard tanks faster.
Really like printing with Tough and Durable. Durable seems to need more supports if you want high accuracy as it flexes more during the peel movements. Haven’t really had any prints fail with either of these resins.
I always liked Black V2. We still have half an expired Cartridge on our shelf, which prints just perfect!
I just finished my first print with Castable Wax and was amazed about the level of detail and the print quality. The mechanical properties however are not well suited for general printing.
Dental Model Resin!
Rigid (I have tried every resin except Castable). I was doing some small parts with 0.010" walls and had no problems with Rigid. Grey Pro isn’t any better on precision than Grey in my experience. If you need surface details to show up, an opaque (white) resin might be better too since it is really difficult to see clear surfaces. It may not be worth the extra money for a new LT tank and Rigid resin though. Maybe you can get some samples made first.
Another vote for Rigid.
Does the dental model resin foam up like the grey standard resins? With the same price as the standard resins it may be an option for me.
Do you feel GP is any worse than Grey? Thinking about switching to be able to use printed parts as final products.
To OP, I’ve been printing with Grey since my first tank, and I think it’s perfect–super crisp details, perfect matte finish, and always impressive detail resolution.
GP has a bit more trouble with fine details. I have been printing parts with Ø1.7mm, 10mm long internal helicoids and while Grey standard works well I couldn’t get these parts to print well in GP. I don’t know if that’s due to the LT tank or not, I am planning on switching to LT tanks for all resins so as soon as I do so for Grey standard we’ll see.
I agree standard grey looks fantastic when it prints well. It also works great for assemblies with moving parts.
Grey Pro isn’t as crisp, and seems to shrink more than standard grey. All of our grey pro prints come out more undersized, and we’re still figuring out how to adjust the model size to get the part size we want. The better part about grey pro is it is MUCH less brittle than grey. We use it for any parts that need to be more durable.
Same thing here. I was very skeptical because the impact resistance and modulus given by Formlabs aren’t really different from Standard Grey, and I really didn’t get a clear explanation from the staff regarding their claim of “improved brittleness”… but we also have come to realize that it is indeed noticeably less brittle. It’s way more brittle than Tough of course, but it’s also much more dimensionally stable.