Just backed this, looks interesting!

Good size build platform, cheaper resins and I am keen to try a DLP printer…

Anyone else looking at one??

Will

1 Like

It looks very promising! I’m keeping an eye on this and hope they’ll succeed with their campaign.

With a top down printer the vat needs to be full. The vat holds 14 L of resin. That means you’ll invest between $900 and $4,200 not including tax and shipping to fill the vat. You better not want to change the resin type very often. They show that you can float less resin on top of salt water. There will be some efficiency loss with this method. At some point the interfacing resin with water will not be as good as the not waterlogged material. If those issues are acceptable, and they maybe, this could be a nice bigger printer.

It looks cool but I don’t know if I can trust them!

Expensive–and as a DLP printer the finest detail it has is 50 micron X/Y which isn’t very good.
Top down printing has a ton of issues as well–it’s difficult to maintain accurate layer thickness, and it will have extreme bleeding (where the light source penetrates beyond the current layer and cures extra material on the underside) since the print is submerged in resin fully and it doesn’t move the resin around which gives resin on the underside a better chance of curing since it will mostly stay in the same place.
Also not confident in their campaign since they have so many errors in the listing. Also would wish people would stop reporting the Formlabs laser spot size as the X/Y resolution, that’s only the minimum X/Y thickness, not the resolution which is controlled by the galvos which means the actual X/Y resolution is in the single digit micron level, that’s the biggest benefit of the Formlabs printers because it can maintain high quality at full build volume.

2 Likes

@DigArt Actually they’re using an idea I had some time ago; they float their resin on saline or glycerine, it’s there on the campaign page, in the FAQ - right at the very bottom of the page. I think they should have highlighted it more.

It’s kind of obvious though in some of the shots; see 1.08 in the campaign vid, as the part is descending, it’s clear the liquid surrounding the part is not resin.

I was wondering about hacking my old F1 to work topdown, so I ran some very basic floating experiments. Not sure how well saline works long term - I wasn’t convinced by it - but I’ve still got a sample in the cupboard floating on glycerine, from before Christmas I think. Checked it just now and it seems fine…

I got the point that they were floating a smaller amount of material on top of salt water or glycerine. What I was trying to say is that if you should not let your floating material get too thin, there could be some slight mixing of resin and water or glycerine and resin. You’ll have to experiment with this to find out how bad that effect really is or is not. Possibly it is a non issue since the model is being dragged down from the top of the floating material. You can estimate how much safety material you’d need to have floating by assuming the surface area of the tank is 300 x 200 ml and your minimum thickness of resin is 5 mm, then you’ll need .6 liters of material for safety stock to fully cover the top of the vat.

This machine only makes sense if you are going to use the larger size capabilities, which are at its lowest accuracy. If that is what you want this for then this could be a great machine for you. The accuracy of the DLP process is dependent on image size. The larger the image the worse the accuracy. So this would not be a good process for large batches of jewelry, and making small batches of jewelry, to increase accuracy, is a waist of material.