Just got a Form 4

Support & Troubleshooting
1

Hi all, I’ve just picked up a Form 4 and would like to ask if there’s anything in particular it would be good to know in my first outing? I went for a basic package, so no wash or cure. I have those from other brands with my previous printer. Just the Grey resin currently and the plate is the Flex plate. It’s all still in the box until the weekend when I’ll get things up and running. I’m new to Formlabs and come from a Uniformation GK2 in case anyone is familiar, but a lot less automated and regulated than the Form 4. Any first time tips would be welcome. Thanks, Ben

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I have a Form4 and 4L used to produce model railroad kit parts. The 4L is dedicated to Grey V5 and the 4 switches between that and Tough 1500 for really fragile parts. Very happy with results. There is NO comparison to an FDM re: the quality you will get from the F4. Just be sure to maximize the print qualities by properly orienting parts. I’ve found the recent PreForm updates have greatly improved the auto-orient and auto-gen layers but you still need to be “smarter” than the software when it comes to setting up your parts for best results.

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Formlabs 4 are much better in terms of quality than FDM, as @SMMW mentioned, the orientation helps massively, I am printing usually jigs and enclosures and I can attest that doing slight changes to the orientations help massively. The workflow in itself is decent, Make sure you read the material’s wash and cure time for optimal results. I’d recommend to also look at the failure mode section in formlabs to understand issues such as elephant foot, warpage , etc

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Thanks for your reply. I’m looking forward to a cleaner workflow and a hopefully more predictable one too than previous resin ventures.

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Thanks for that. Is tough 1500 drill-able?

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I have tried it only a handful of times and It was drill-able.

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Slight tangent, we do a lot of Tough 2000 V2 with post-processing, it drills and taps like the majority of thermoplastics, really good long swarf, no shattering of holes etc.

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Thanks for that. I’ll give it a go.

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Note that you need the Cure for the tough resins. Unlike the general purpose resins for which curing is optional, the Tough resins come out of the printer incredibly soft, very sticky and very easy to damage. They are unusable without curing.

After curing though, brilliant material!

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Will any cure station be suitable if it has a timer?

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Depends on your use case; for hobbyist use, things that don’t really “matter”, sure. As long as it’s 405nm light, it’ll polymerise the material… to some unknown extent.

But… the whole point of buying into the FormLabs ecosystem is the pre-validated ‘system’ end to end. Material properties are published against international standards, TDS and SDS documents provided, that contain data for the materials when printed using pre-validated print settings, processed through a given wash cycle, and cured in the Cure V1 or V2.

The light intensity, temperature, pre-heat times etc all contribute to the final properties. Our use case is functional parts, critical fixtures, mold tools and inserts etc - so deviating from the fully validated process sort of defeats the point in my opinion.

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Thanks, I think I’ll aim for the wash station next as mines a bit janky.