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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- “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.
- 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.