Market for Formlabs printed parts

General Discussion
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Hi Guys,

We have been using the formlabs Fuse 1+ and form 4 for a few months now. We are a service provider in India, Pune. The market for 3D printing in India is very competitive and the cost of the formlabs powder and resin is not helping us. Nylon PA12 is almost 20-40% cheaper for HP and EOS systems. The SLA market for formlabs is also very niche in India.

I wanted to know from the community if you guys have found a market for the Formlabs SLA and if yes, do you have any suggestions of whom we can target, which material would be ideal for the market? This is a long shot but if anyone requires service on the formlabs form 4 or Fuse 1+, please let me know. We would love to work with you.

Regards,
Shrinivas
Kaash Studio

Hello@kaashstudio.com
(+91) 9145648648

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Morning!

I am US based, but talking with many colleagues I realized internationally this experience is pretty universal. I will be pretty honest here after trying to dip my toes back in the service bureau world with a Form 4B starting several months ago; I believe it will be very difficult for anyone to consistently make money with Formlabs machines in a competitive service bureau environment, impossible without already established clients with personal relationships and deep pockets…

I will talk about SLS first actually, because you hit the nail on the head and everything I am about to say for SLS can be almost directly applied to SLA. There is a reason the only people using Fuse system are companies who can generate their own demand to print or prototyping for R&D. You will almost never see service bureaus actually making consistent money using a fleet of Fuse 1+, because it does not make any sense over buying even just 1 or 2 HP or EOS machine. Those machines are larger (can fit much bigger parts), MUCH faster, and more reliable. Most importantly, material for those machine are CHEAPER at volume compared to Fuse. I was ordered sample parts from the Fuse system recently to evaluate its capabilities and shocked to find outsourcing my parts to a large service bureau to be made on an HP system to be cheaper with faster turnaround. They already have the capital paid off and can out-economy scale any small service bureau. It makes no sense to order from a service bureau with Fuse 1+ who struggle to print Nylon12GF and not be able to deliver for several weeks while I can get those parts made reliably on an HP machine for usually cheaper anyways.

Like I said, this argument can be directly applied to SLA as well. To compete with large service bureaus with Carbon and Stratasys Origin machines, I need a room full of Form 4s, and even then, I cannot compete on quality nor material choice nor reliability. Furthermore, believe it or not, those machines are moving towards open material by Loctite and such with often better workflow, curing time, and are CHEAPER than formlabs materials. I do not believe currently the Form 4 can stand up to a service bureau environment with many clients not happy with the quality the printer output. You can real all about it here: My experience with the Form 4(B) so far/ Semi-Review from a Semi-Industrial User Perspective

Long story short, the Form 4 ecosystem is nowhere near mature. Leaving the printer’s inability to print accurately aside, the post processing workflow is extensive. By the time you favor in the labor for washing, curing, and grinding away support marks and polishing model to presentable condition, the turnaround time and labor cost a substantial amount. I already had a case where client reported it makes no sense to order parts from me with a 2-3 week turnaround with only 10-20% cost savings, while a big service bureau can print on a 3D systems machine in one go and deliver within the week.

Unfortunately, the people who actually will buy 3D printed parts (that I have found) consistently are:

  1. Aerospace, government
  2. Fortune 500/ engineering companies consistently prototyping
  3. Hospitals, clinics, point of care application (usually they buy their machine)

Most of these people can afford outsourcing to big service bureaus or buy their own machines. The small service bureaus I know have survived by having personal relationships and a couple production contracts. The ones relying on niches usually go out of business.

Long story short, I am lucky that this is a side hustle, and I have a nonprofit side profiting free printing as well. My goal was to break even, and that still failed from the lack of reliability and quality that I can depend on from the Form 4. Your best bet is to network and find clients with consistent needs for parts such as engineering companies during short production runs or medical/ biotech companies needing biocompatible parts. Do serious testing and make sure Form 4 can deliver what you want from it (especially from the engienering and biocompatible resins, they are the ONLY thing unique about this system that can compete on paper with big name machines). Shake hands and develop personal relationships. Those people are probably not reading the Formlabs forums lol

I wish you best of luck.

edit: I think it would be probably necessary for Formlabs to lower SLA and SLS material by at least like 50% for any of this to begin to make more sense… but before then, the Form 4 needs to do what it is advertised to do and print with a semblance of accuracy.

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Hi @eaglechen ,

Thanks for sharing such a detailed response. I agree with it, the major downside of Formlabs is its material cost. They have significantly reduced the material cost for the SLA printers. I am hoping something similar will happen with the powders too.

Currently, we also provide HP MJF services. The part quality of the Fuse and HP is not very far after the post-processing. The mechanical properties will be different but visually for prototyping, its alright.

Due to the high material cost, printing on Fuse 1+ is a little challenging and now we are trying to find a market that requires specific materials like the PA 11 CF or any unique materials on the Form 4. Only then can we use the printers to its full capacity.

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I do not agree when I read that the Formlabs ecosystem is “nowhere near mature”. The Formlabs ecosystem is meant for those who print on-premise. it was never developed to enable you to run a printing business. We need prints when we need them, and we need just one or two. They are always different and we require modifications, alternative designs and so on, and we want it all on our desk tomorrow. If you think you need “a room full of Form 4 printers” then you consider a printing business that produces small series for customers or something like that. For that, work with a different printer manufacturer. But for my use case, my three Form 3 printers are doing fantastic.

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Formlabs marketing…

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^ Exactly

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Ahh ok. Don’t know anything about the Indian market of course but I’ll expand on some of the things I said, may add some value to the discussion.

Yes, I do think nylon 12 printing is reasonably ok/ reliably on Fuse 1 at this point, probably with comparable reliability and cosmetics and maybe properties compared to large MJF or SLS machines. The primary problem here is consumable cost larger than like the HP system at volume. If you have an HP system already, the advantage of Fuse 1+ is, as you said, to tap into niche materials and maybe create a market. I do not believe anyone else in SLS in MJF world is offering Nylon 11CF printing especially, may be for a reason. I do believe there is a niche market for nylon 12GF (people do consistently order this from MJF) or like nylon 11/11CF printing at a volume good for the Fuse if your MJF system is constantly printing large volume nylon 12. Unfortunately, I have heard things about Fuse being very hit or miss in reliability and not really being able to print Nylon 12GF, with nylon 11 and 11CF being much worse, so your mileage may vary here.

I am pretty curious as to if you can get 11CF to work reliably, this is the true unique point of Fuse material wise compared to everyone else, and maybe for good reason (I have heard it is very hard to print with, even more finnicky than 12GF).

Let’s talk about SLA. Yes, it is good that Formlabs have reduced price for general purpose materials; however, the general purpose V5 do not have competitive material properties and I don’t think I have had anyone order them from me, ever. This is completely leaving aside the fact none of them print accurately and have a pretty bad warping problem from the printer (you can read all about it in my thread linked in my first reply). Yes, they are stronger than the general purpose v4 resins (which are like cheap acrylic) versus V5 material performance comparable to like a generic PLA. They can probably print little figurines but no serious engineering companies or anyone prototyping or doing limited run functional parts for that matter have ordered them from me. Unfortunately, the price of resins like engineering or biomed are all $200-300 per cartridge.

The thing that on paper sets Formlabs apart for me for the Form 4 is currently this (I do unfortunately think the reliability and turn-key performance of this printer is a myth, at least at the moment however):

  1. Ability to quick swap materials and capture many niches (most industrial and desktop system can do it but still).
  2. Engineering resins that are actually functional
  3. Biomed/ biocompatible materials

Most people want tough 1500/2000 or a rigid resin part. Unfortunately, I could never get tough 1500/2000 to print accurate at the moment, getting an accurate straight edge or consistent 0.2mm accuracy is impossible, and worse than general purpose v5 resins. This is not to mention a very very inconsistent curing workflow where you finally get a good part just to have the print implode and curl in on itself in the cure. Keep in mind, these engineering resins have not changed in price and are $200/ cartridge, probably more expensive not in US. These general reliability problems have put me off from using biomed resins in fear of chucking expensive failed prints in the trash. Biomed resins are $200-300 per cartridge.

Due to these concerns, I usually tell people to order SLS or MJF parts for small runs unless they absolutely have to have biocompatibility or are absolutely obsessed with surface finish (usually can be convinced as most SLS and MJF part looks good these days). The true niche of SLA in context of Form 4 is probably like high fidelity prototypes and biomedical stuff that SLS cannot do.

edit: saw you have Form 4 and not 4B I think? If so this becomes an even harder proposition. I would do some serious testing in like the tough and engineering resins to see if they can do what you want to do… So far I have had people drop me and have been unsuccessfully in making good parts with Form 4. I wish you better luck.

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@eaglechen
Thanks for sharing your experience. We have booked the form 4 and we are expecting it soon. We have a bunch of Chinese LCD printers such as Phrozen and elegoo. They do alright for printing general resins and non engineering parts. Saturn 3 ultra has a good tolerance but the reliability of the quality is not too high. There is a high chance of getting it wrong when parts are critical.
Our goal was to add a good printer for engineering applications. We already provide services in SLS and MJF. We want to explore the industry for SLA and considered form 4 to be a good entry point.
We are hoping that we can run resins like tough 2000, Rigid 4k, and the silicone 40A. We want to find a comparative study of these materials with other printers. i.e how does the silicone 40A perform when compared to its competitors?

I am surprised to find that the print quality of the form 4 is not that great and I read your post on the wrapping issues. Did formlabs provide you with a solution to it?

Thanks

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Morning!

Unfortunately I increasingly do not think that there is any significant difference between that Formlabs offers as a print process over the Chinese LCD printers. I think a lot of what Formlabs claim they can do is only good marketing. As the moment, the Form 4 is not capable of printing a straight edge or most things that need to be accuracy consistently, often failing to achieve within 2-5mm (yes, 2-5mm warping, not 0.2-0.5mm) accuracy over a 100mm part. Unfortunately, I think Formlabs is currently charging all of us an industrial 3D printing experience in operating costs for a desktop 3D printing experience, and you will have a equally frustrating experience with Form 4 compared to those Chinese printers. Furthermore, all of Form 4’s settings are locked down completely without a open material license so your hands are tied and cannot tune anything to make consequential changes.

I recently ordered some Loctite series resin parts from local source running those cheap desktop printers and unfortunately have to say they look much better and more accurate than anything I have ever printed off the Form 4 in engineering resins.

You will probably be not be able to find a comparison study on tough 2000, rigid, and silicone 40A. Those are on paper Formlab’s strong point. In term of resin markers, only like Loctite and BASF are making similar engineering resins (which I think you can use on your desktop printers). Otherwise, you are looking at proprietary materials by like Carbon or 3D systems. Unfortunately, you will have a very inconsistent experience with Formlabs engineering resins. I struggled to get Tough 2000 to print accurately recently, and had to decline a client project. Printing problems aside, the difficulty with tough 2000 and rigid 4000 is also curing, which both have a high temperature (70C) work flow, which is well above heat deflection temperature of green materials. Even curing on supports can lead to a successful print bending on itself and destroying itself during the cure process (this is a seperate problem from Form 4 printing highly warped parts).

I categorize like rigid 4000 and tough 2000 as partly experimental, where you could occasionally have some success. I categorize silicon 40A as fully experimental where you will usually not have success. The post-processing workflow is extensive. The support material interaction is messy and highly prone to failure. Even Formlabs themselves advise you to use like tearaway structure and design stuff to print directly on platform with no supports. I played with this a bit on Form 3, and it is cool for research and playing with; however, I do not believe you will ever, ever achieve any semblance of reliably service bureau printing with it.

If you have not received your machine yet I would recommend you tread very careful, order sample parts and do your research. If you can afford/ have the business case for a MJF machine already I would recommend one of two things:

  1. Invest and investigate in some more open-material desktop machines. See if you can print Loctite materials (do some settings development and tuning to optimize those) and see if customer demand is there (maybe you have done this already).
  2. If customer demand is TRULY there, invest in an industrial SLA system like the big 3D systems top down machines. The reliability and performance of those things are in another world. Everyone I know making consistent money with SLA have a couple of those or like an industrial DLP or polyjet machine.

In regards to the warping problem, I met with the SLA product lead and a lead settings engineer from Formlabs about 3 months ago. Since then, no news or improvement has occured. They told me point blank that Formlabs does not have a solution nor timeline to fix this issue. I increasingly think this is a complex issue of printer-material interaction, and we are years away from a fix, if possible at all. It may require material changes or extensive printer setting re-development.

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I’ve been personally eyeballing the new HeyGears Reflex RS that released this week… looks to be very promising in it’s accuracy n dependability

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Just want to add my own workflow findings here. I run a couple of form3s and a form 3L. I have found with the tough resin to get parts to cure with minimal warping, running them first through a clear cycle and letting them cool off can help. It’s only a 15 minute cycle at a lower temperature so has less likelihood of warping. Or you could even run them through a custom cycle with zero heat for 30 minutes.

It’s a fudge but it gets parts through production.

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I will have to disagree on the formlabs ecosystem not being mature it has benefited our company greatly. Reducing our outsourcing needs and giving us faster turnaround times we can get a P.O. and have the job printing within a hour and depending on the material and printer we can have the parts in 1 to 12 +hrs.

We run alot of production jobs and have a week lead time on most job some are quick turn arounds. We offer our customers different ranges of finishes from just support removal all the way up to paint ready finish and each level increases lead time.

Just friday i had a job using Elastic 50A v2 on the 3L I had 19 parts I had to sand perfectly smooth and it took longer to post process than it did to sand had them all done by lunch.

What Im trying to say is it works and saves alot of time and money. Throw in the open material abilities its even better been using multiple Loctite 3D resins and they are matching all the products we had to outsource before and some are even better. We are planning on adding more machines in the future. Here is our current setup

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Hi @MattRForerunner
Thanks for your reply. Its good to know that all your printers are doing great. Many people mentioned that they had warpage problems with the prints and prints failing on the Form 4/Form 3+. Is that something you faced too? And did you find a solution to avoid it?
Also, which materials are you mostly using for production jobs?

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Morning!

I am not discounting your experience; however, I do think we should discuss this to be fair: the setup you show via a picture includes what appears to be a custom/ 3rd party curing ovens (which are probably not cheap), and of course usage of open materials in addition to the full Formlabs workflow. There also seems to be a very large 3D systems top-down professional SLA system of the right side… A quick google search, if I am not mistake, indicates you are a professional service bureau running the Formlabs printers alongside much more expensive industrial systems including aforementioned large frame SLA systems and per your website (I think) you are also operating DLP machine by carbon and origin, and polyjets. All this means we should take into consideration that:

  1. I do not know how you run your business, and from what I can tell you are much more successful than I am or ever will be in additive in terms of volume and making money. However, you do seem to operate Formlabs machines alongside much more expensive industrial machines; you do also claim the Formlabs machines essentially reduce outsourcing needs and buys additional capacity. This all would indicate you are fitting the Formlabs machines into a niche of sorts in between the professional systems to unlock niche markets and produce additional capacity for primary systems, which is very different than me having one Form 4 and depending on that printer entirely. I think there is a reason why you have not sold all your much, much more expensive professional systems and bought a room of Formlabs printers. Maybe “ecosystem maturity” (which Formlabs marketing pushes very aggressive) is not exactly the same.
  2. I have no doubt the Form 4 (or other Formlabs printers) can do very well printing things directly on platform, printing things completely optimized to print on Form 4, or print elastic things that will work sometimes. However, I don’t think you need me to tell you there are serious geometry restrictions and reliability differences following Formlabs design guidelines between like general purpose resins and elastic ones, just read this forum or ask Formlabs themselves. My claim of ecosystem immaturity stem from this as well, a lot of what Formlabs does material wise is and will be experimental in nature. Again, you have the option of reengineering/ edit parts with Materialize, or printing on industrial systems. Most people cannot walk over to their SLA-5000 and are priced out of advanced meshing software like materialize (or have the technical manpower) to make something exactly printable on the Formlabs printer that has been always marketed to be turn key and reliable for EVERY material.
  3. With substantial investment into 3rd party equipment as well as usage of Formlabs open material license, you are doing a lot of the engineering yourself; this is expensive, time consuming, and requires manpower as you know. You are making the print settings, and then testing the curing and full finishing workflow. If one uses Loctite resin, a high power UV oven that is not the Formcure (separate point if you use the CureL do keep in mind that it costs a substantially amount and is not normally marketed to be sold with Form 3/4), and the settings you developed yourself, there comes a point where you can argue that you are not using the Formlabs ecosystems anymore. This becomes you doing the ecosystems maturation and development (arguably for Formlabs), which is far, far from a “turnkey mature ecosystem.”

Couples more considerations:

  1. Having to sand 19 parts all substantially to achieve smoothness indicates large supports tip sizes and printer inability. Taking all morning before lunch to do so is substantial labor and technician time.
  2. “Throw in the open material abilities” requires paying Formlabs $2k for Form 4 (and of course substantial effort in making good print settings for those materials). This is half the price of a Form 4 printer and I can buy 10 desktop printers that can do this by default for the price of that. You also probably know even ~100k printers like origin and carbon do open material by default and come with fully developed settings for those materials such as Loctite series.
  3. If I am using a Formlabs printer like a cheap desktop system from China and doing all the work of babysitting the machine such as settings development, tuning, etc, I think it would be truly illogical to pay Formlabs a multiple thousand dollar premium to have the same experience. I do not believe the Formlabs hardware is anything special, the support touch tip sizes are 0.5-0.65mm, similar and larger to what those desktop systems usually prints with across the board. Again, no longer an ecosystems if I am not even using Formlabs materials. I have seen parts off of these $200-300 much more consistent and accurate that what I can achieve on Form 4 with substantial effort.

I have no doubt this system benefits your company. However, one success case, and especially if that case is usage in a niche that can bypass every weakness of the machine and system, does not necessary imply ecosystem maturity or absolves Formlabs printers of their issues. I recommend you give my thread a read as well: My experience with the Form 4(B) so far/ Semi-Review from a Semi-Industrial User Perspective

edit: @shrinivas97 asked about Form 4 in the original prompt, so I limited my discussion to that. Form 3 ironically probably prints a bit more reliably and suffer from less of a warping problem due to having more time behind development. A lot of the features such as breakaway supports and smaller support points (which are smaller on Form 3 currently) have not been developed for Form 4 yet. My points about general reliability and operating of Formlabs ecosystem is pretty much the same for all of their SLA products.

Edit: I have misunderstood some of @MattRForerunner’s practices per his replies below. He seems to be an experienced AM technician and his opinions are worth a lot. I do think a lot of my core points still stand, but a lot of what I said here are not accurate. I will leave this reply be to preserve thread flow, but PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE read on and do not take what I said right here out of context.

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Absolutely! I’ll start with SLS, as you’ve hit the nail on the head.

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We add honeycombs on pieces if the parts allow for it we haven’t experienced very much warping on the parts we produce for customers mostly on personal projects. right now we mostly are using Flexible 80A V1, ESD, Elastic 50A V1 & V2, Tough 2000 (I recommend avoiding Tough 1500), Clear V4, High Temp, and Silicone. As we get more Figured out with the Loctite Materials on the Form 4 we will be running more jobs on that right now that is mostly used for R&D. Most of our print failures are user errors not fully understanding the Materials and not using enough supports.

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So Ill just answer and reply to some of your statements here and misunderstandings:

  1. "the setup you show via a picture includes what appears to be a custom/ 3rd party curing ovens (which are probably not cheap), and of course usage of open materials in addition to the full Formlabs workflow. There also seems to be a very large 3D systems top-down professional SLA system of the right side… " **That is a 3Dsystems Curing oven that we got with the 3DSystems SLA 5000 both are from the mid 90s and are what our company started on. My boss bought them from a company that was closing down. We use this machine for a few jobs a year that are to big to run on the Formlab machines and the versatility of Formlabs is so much cheaper than the 5000 we only use one material in the 5000 and it cost 75000 to fill a vat for the machine which is the whole reason we started using formlab machines last year. **
  2. "However, you do seem to operate Formlabs machines alongside much more expensive industrial machines; you do also claim the Formlabs machines essentially reduce outsourcing needs and buys additional capacity. This all would indicate you are fitting the Formlabs machines into a niche of sorts in between the professional systems to unlock niche markets and produce additional capacity for primary systems, which is very different than me having one Form 4 and depending on that printer entirely. " We do run the 4- Formlabs alongside 3- HP MJF4200 machines 1- Bambu Lab X1 Machine, It all depends on what the customers want and what materials they require so each machine has a job there’s no niche we do everything from parts for Disney to Firearms. Sometimes the job will require multiple different processes, and we are able to achieve that using the Formlab printers and not outsourcing the parts. When I first started here, we were constantly wait for outsourced parts whether it be Carbon or some flexible or elastic parts etc. now we only have to outsource parts that we can’t yet do on the Formlabs like metal parts or parts that are bigger than the build platforms. The reasons we still keep the SLA 5000 is purely because we have a few customers who require that larger size print and it still a useful machine for those customers that aren’t quite ready for a MJF part and can still prototype at a cheaper rate.
  3. *“I have no doubt the Form 4 (or other Formlabs printers) can do very well printing things directly on platform, printing things completely optimized to print on Form 4, or print elastic things that will work sometimes. However, I don’t think you need me to tell you there are serious geometry restrictions and reliability differences following Formlabs design guidelines between like general purpose resins and elastic ones,”***We having used any elastic materials on the Form 4 outside of R&D with Loctite resins but the only issue we have ran into is the z-height needs some compensation thrown is to get the parts more accurate. Now on the Form 3 we use flexible/ elastic materials all day and have no issues with reliability and can run production jobs around the clock without much fall out there have been some growing pains, but they have met the quality and standards required from our customers and in the end that’s all that matters **
  4. *“With substantial investment into 3rd party equipment as well as usage of Formlabs open material license, you are doing a lot of the engineering yourself; this is expensive, time consuming, and requires manpower as you know. You are making the print settings, and then testing the curing and full finishing workflow. If one uses Loctite resin, a high power UV oven that is not the Formcure (separate point if you use the CureL do keep in mind that it costs a substantially amount and is not normally marketed to be sold with Form 3/4), and the settings you developed yourself, there comes a point where you can argue that you are not using the Formlabs ecosystems anymore. This becomes you doing the ecosystems maturation and development (arguably for Formlabs), which is far, far from a “turnkey mature ecosystem.””*We don’t use any third party equipment when it comes to the Formlabs parts with the exception of the High Temp resin we do use a Cerakote oven for the final Cure which we are unable to reach the temperature in our other ovens. We saw the ability to bring more materials in house and getting the open material licenses has already paid for itself just for that reason. We do most the engineering in house but some customers will supply it We use the CureL (which we got when we purchased the Form 3L) for curing all the Loctite resins and a smoker for some of the materials that require longer hotter cures but we only have the open material on the Form 4 the other 3 printers are using the full Formlabs Ecosystem I created my own recipe book from the information given to us from Formlabs and follow their curing and wash direction to the T and have been getting amazing results. With Loctite we use their supplied recipes for everything and are matching parts that we previously had to outsource with both brands of resins.

We use a much smaller size touch tip than the 0.5 on the machines and the reason for having to achieve the smoothness had nothing to do with the printer but to match samples I already worked that we sent to the customer and elastic 50A isn’t the easiest to sand the supports smooth but I was saying that we were able to get the job the night before and have it done and ready to ship before noon was a reason why we love these machines. It didn’t take me all morning to sand more like 30 mins to sand all 19 parts. I said that the washing and curing took more time than the actual finishing. Also, during this morning we are Blasting MJF parts, Clearing supports off FDM parts, throwing finished MJF parts in the dye, Vapor smoothing parts that require that step it wasn’t spent just sanding the 19 parts. We have no issues with consistent accurate parts with the formlabs and we believe the ability to get materials quickly and help with issues real quick makes the extra costs much more worth it and more valuable than what you get when you buy the cheap printers who do you call when your printer breaks or has issues where when I have had any issues with the printer I have someone helping me within a hour and checking back to see if the problem has been solved.

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Evening!

I appreciate the clarification and apologize for any misunderstanding; I kept my original message to keep the thread intact but added a clarification to reflect what you have said. However, I do think the core of my points stand:

  1. Curious that the SLA 5000 (a 30-35 year old machine now) seems to be cheaper than MJF from what you have said? No doubt the investment in the machine and just filling the vat is substantial; however I do wonder if the Formlabs material offer any statistically significant savings compared to especially current generation large frame SLA machines. My experience with outsourcing those parts from top down SLA machines and top of the line DLP printers (which largely make stuff from open materials like Loctite) shows I have to charge similar prices to those experiences.
    Also yes no doubt that the advantage of any top down mSLA/ DLP process is ability to swap materials and ability to avoid buying a giant vat of material. However, Formlabs is not unique in this regard obviously, any desktop LCD printer or any of the professional DLP printers can do this.
  2. I think you can argue that if you have a fleet of MJF machines bringing in your main business then the Formlabs machines are operating in their niche. Using the printer to avoid outsourcing a small portion of parts and creating specific business is the definition of a niche.
  3. If you are dealing with clients including Fortune 500s, you are definitely more successful than I am and ever will be lol. Maybe what I really need is some more clients like yours… (this is a joke but I do think it illustrates an important point). I do not believe I have experienced any lenience with “growing pains” targeting clients who traditionally use large bureaus with 100-200K machines as a speed and cost competitor. Any “growing pains” or any difference from delivering a theoretically flawless result in accordance with the Formlabs claimed accuracies of 0.2+/- resulting in any delay or deviance created immediate fallout and me being dropped as a service provider… The fact you also personally recommending avoiding Tough 1500 in a reply to shrinivas97 in addition to initial problems with elastics illustrates a large deviance from Formlabs marketing:
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    I would argue the inability to print some of the material library consistently and having a lot of experimental materials that are only in reality cool to occasionally print with is not a sign of a mature ecosystem. I printed extensively with V5 general purpose materials, as well as engineering materials such as Tough 1500/2000 and Rigid 4000 on Form 4, and had extensive issues. I will also point out your reliability is achieved on the Form 3 and not Form 4, which I will discuss later.
  4. Materials, and the software interactions and ecosystems development (allowing for reliability) by Formlabs is the biggest selling point of their printers. This is also honestly the selling point of any industrial printing system. Using a 3rd party material voids this advantage. It would be different is the Formlabs platform itself offers a very reliable and accurate and technology allowing for like very very small touch tips or incredible software, however I don’t think they have some super secret sauce in terms of a screen flashing UV onto liquid or minimalizing peel forces different to a significant degree compared to the desktop printers. Using a CureL does not change the proposition of experimenting and basically leaving the most important part of the Formlabs ecosystem aside. Keep in mind Loctite makes profiles as well for very cheap desktop machines in addition to the expensive systems. Furthermore, the fact you have to pay for this is pretty unexpected compared to rest of the industry. $2K is well spent when it represents value; I would argue it does not when Formlabs simply is asking users for money to unlock their printer with no development versus top of the line systems such as Origin and Carbon provide those profiles integrated to the printer by default for 3rd party materials.
  5. Additionally I will expand this side point; the CureL is great, but it is $4500… that is more than the Form 4 costs, and I run into quite a few parts that do not actually fit into the legacy cure united designed for Form 3. Formlabs still only bundles and markets legacy unit with the Form 4. This means that a full realistic workflow is printer + CureL + wash units. Add on service contracts and you are at well over 5 figure prices.

Couple more things:

  1. I am aware you can print with less than 0.5mm touchpoints… It is my regular practice to do very custom supports using 0.5mm to anchor down big contacts and use like 0.15-0.25 points for small features or smaller parts (this practice’s reliability does fall off a cliff the more exotic and elastic material is used of course). I just don’t think this is a Formlabs unique advantage anymore. These are also default settings I have seen for many desktop 3D printing slicers and $250 LCD printers can also do this. I think this supports my theory that the peel forces for these being pretty identical.
  2. 30 minute washing + 30-60 minute drying + 30-60 minutes curing + couple hours sanding and polishing parts is far longer than some of the print times on the Form 4. This is still substantial post-processing in my opinion for the manual work involved.
  3. Industrial 3D printing is get what you pay for… I am painfully aware of this. I don’t mind paying a premium for anything if it works, in fact, I want that experience. I want “industrial 3D printing” and a locked in ecosystem that works. If the Form 4 can deliver what Formlabs says it can it would be an incredible value proposition and incredibly fair. The issue is of course this currently just is not reality, and I do not really see a quick path to even like 95% print reliability for a few core materials that I want to actually print with. I have a big problem with being charged industrial 3D printing experience prices and getting a desktop 3D printing experience. My problem is this supposed value from “tight ecosystem integration” fails and is not being delivered for me.
  4. I was also literally not allowed to buy the 4B without a service contract. People who work at support are incredible and deserve a raise. However, they are only capable of solving surface issues and reading from a script or giving you occasional free stuff to ensure fallout does occur… They are not engineers / technicians and cannot give you suggestions beyond “send the machine back” or “try reorienting per our guide that is publicly available information and super obvious for any AM technician” or “I will follow up with our engineering team” and then transfer you over to another support agent who you need to convince the problem is real once again… This to me is not value, especially when I was told I was not allowed to talk to any technicians or engineers to try to solve the core issue.
  5. Printing something overnight way faster than any outsourcing is the point of having a printer in house… regardless of what system it is. If anything, Form 3 is significantly slower than its desktop LCD printer counterparts. This is why the Form 4 exists, to literally address the Form 3 shortcomings. The 4X speed improvement from Form 4 is real. Form 4 also does fix a lot of the hardware problems such as fragile tanks and poor cartridge design, etc. Ironically, albeit with a lot of potential, Form 4 does print worse than 3 in my opinion right now by a large margin. 3 can probably do the general purpose materials with some reliability. Some of the more exotic engineering materials and elastic biomed stuff may forever be experimental however… The issue is even after meeting with the SLA lead at Formlabs and their team, I was literally told there is no timeline to fix accuracy and warping issues on their flagship printer.

Think your experience and mine may be attributed to our material and printer choices. I think you said you are printing mostly R&D and doing personal projects with Form 4. I also did experience success with this initially and than had a very, very rude awakening trying to make client parts. Very curious as to the accuracy you have seen as well as long term real world success?

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Your point of “Formlabs Support deserving a raise” because of their responsiveness but only being able to read from a script is spot on.

I would say this has been our biggest problem with the Formlabs and the Fuse systems. When Nylon 12 GF came out… it was literally unprintable due to firmware. I have email correspondences between dozens of support reps over a 6 month period where I had to re explain the issues repeatedly. Including a support rep finally flying in on scene…who couldn’t get it to work either but at least he had direct contact with an actual engineer to relay the problem. THEN they acknowledged it and gave us a beta that fixed the issue. That beta ran “ok” till another firmware release came out that literally “cooked” our original Fuse which then had to be replaced as we replaced it with a Fuse 1+.

As far as “Formlabs ecosystem being mature”…

If I am paying for full blown support and warranty… I would expect to be able to at least get someone on the phone or at least in “the email”… that has actually ran a printer themselves and/or has one available to reference the problem. At least within a couple email confirmations through the basic support team.

We paid for full blown delivery and setup of the system and when it came time to be delivered they basically threw it off the truck and said good luck. Formlabs said they did not have any reps available in our area. Not a big issue for us but again it would be nice to have a team backing that in support, that actually runs a printer… Especially when “we” are acting as their beta testers and discovering major issues that need addressed in their new product launches.

Thankfully Nylon 12 GF has become stable for us but that was after literally a hundred emails, half of which was just us trying to “convince” multiple support reps, that there was in fact a problem.

I have found that there is nothing mature about this ecosystem…until we the consumer… has had time to beta test and refine it a bit AFTER release.

Back to the point of the thread…

These systems are absolutely amazing IF you are producing prototypes, parts on an aerospace/defense budget or in your own high end niche company where you sell direct to consumer via website or contract.

There is no margin left at all, to wholesale out parts or to produce for someone else in a general consumer market.

That has been our experience at least.

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Speaking of which… with the release of the “4L” and the “Nylon 12 Tough”, and “Nylon 12 White”…

Who will be jumping onboard as Beta testers?! :rofl:

“Not it…”

But interested to see how the new material do