Is Grey Pro the same as the current Grey v5? (Form4)

General Discussion
1

I’ve blown thru all the Grey V5 that I have, but still have a liter of Grey Pro Resin 1 that’s about a year old.
Its’ going to be another day or two before my next shipment arrives, and we’re trying to run 4 cycles/day on the deck… so I am trying to find options…

  1. is it possible to run that instead of the Grey Pro?
  2. Can I run it in the same tray?
  3. Can I pour it into the Grey V5 container that I have?
2

It should work, but may not be as good as a new one would be so keep that in mind and maybe do a test print.

3

How does the Form4 know the level of resin in a container? Does it have some sort of sensor to figure out that the container is refilled?
My one liter of Grey Pro is in the old can (Form 3 container), so I’d have to pour it into the Form4 1L bottle…not sure that this would work ok?

4

Hey David!

Some good questions here! Happy to address them!

  1. On Grey Pro vs Grey V5, they are not the same formulation, so we definitely don’t recommend pouring any of one into the other. Totally understand this slows you down for a couple days, so my sincere apologies for that inconvenience.
  2. We wouldn’t recommend it. My only caveat to this is if you’re already going to dispose of a tank and you just want to see what happens. What you don’t want is to pour Grey Pro into a Grey V5 tank, and then your new shipment of Grey V5 arrives, and now you’ve got a contaminated tank that probably won’t handle any combination of resins super well in the long term.
  3. This unfortunately runs into the same issue as #2 above.

As to your next question, this is again something we officially do not recommend, but you could pour old resin into a Form 4 cartridge, and then tell the printer to start a print anyways despite the low resin warnings, and it should be able to proceed, but see points #2, and #3 above.

The Form 4 has a few ways of knowing how much resin is in the cartridge, but the basic process is that each cartridge is individually chipped, so the printer knows how long it’s dispensed resin from any individual cartridge. In combination with this estimate, the printer also knows how much resin is in the tank, and how much is being added as it dispenses.(The ultrasonic sensor that does this measurement is just next to the camera if you’re curious!)

Using a combination of the above factors, the Form 4 can make a pretty good estimate of how much resin has been dispensed from a given cartridge.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any additional questions!

5

Well, for those who come behind, let me give the followup on how this went…

  1. You’re correct… they aren’t the same.
  2. You’re also correct - it might work some…

So… I had a full 1L of Grey Pro, and poured it into a Grey V5 bottle, then stuck it in and printed.
Several factors:

  1. THe first 2 print jobs (~300-400ml) did fine. I attribute this to the fact that the print tray still had a substantial amount of V5 in it when this started… but I could be wrong. They looked perfectly normal and seemed to have all standard strength and flex measurements as the V5…
  2. my product prints for this test were small tubes (approx 80/build), but only about 80mm tall…

After the first 2 jobs, a number of issues arose.

  • printed projects began to thin dramatically - visibly translucent and weaker
  • numerous separations from the build plate. I had 4 sequential fails in the first 50 ish layers
  • products were dramatically weaker.

In the end, I drained it back out, cleaned the tray, and tossed the rest of the resin. i was able to carefully wipe out the tray and it’s been working flawlessly since…

It could have very easily damaged the build tray, as numerous rafts kept snapping off and sticking to the tray… fortunately it didn’t, and with some very tenacious and slow massaging, I was able to get the parts off the plate without damage.

So, to answer my own question- it was a helpful lesson learned… I was able to make enough prototypes to get thru the 48hrs until the resin arrived, but won’t make that mistake again!

1 Like
6

Hey David,

Thanks for the follow-up! I’m glad you were able to do some relatively consequence-free experimentation! It’s definitely good to figure out what you’re comfortable with and what works.

7

Mechanical property wise, the 2 resins are very similar and that’s why I suggested giving a test print a try, but maybe the formula used in the resins don’t interact all that well with each other. I know other people have successfully mixed resins before.

1 Like
8

This topic was automatically closed 182 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.