Morning @kmcnultyform, again, I appreciate your time speaking with me. A lot of ideas are tossed around during the meeting, let’s summarize and put them into concrete, actionable items. Everything else is in all honestly, a nitpick. I ultimately don’t care if the printer is louder than a freight train if it makes me amazing parts. Let’s sort by timeline to make this easier:
- SHORT TERM – focus here should be print settings. If this printer cannot actually print accurately or live up to a reasonably easy to use and reliable industrial process, Form 4 will not survive very long.
- MEDIUM TERM – focus here should be immediate workflow, namely curing. These are large problems also somewhat carried over for Form 3. If you did not hear it from me, I guarantee other users will probably say this in the future. People will tolerate some experimentation, but they will eventually notice that their perfect print have to get tossed; this is obviously no good either. This step is even more crucial for printing like 3L sized things and finishing them accurately.
- LONG TERM – perhaps better processes like arraying or better materials. Honestly, this is the least important, and this is the most personal opinion and honestly long term strategy for Formlabs. I am just pointing out competitor trends and what people want in terms of models since I am ultimately a service bureau. This falls into a nit pick.
Short term is simplest in terms of being very concrete but most crucial. I have nothing to say at it seems this issue is being worked on. However, of course it will remain to be seen whether a few months is 1-3 or 6-12:
A. Warping and overhang performance is issue #1, I will live with inferior support material if this is solved. Understandably wanting to print most of your material library reliably is a reasonable expectation.
B. That being said I lot of actually good industrial DLP competitors are moving towards thinner touchpoints and thinner lattice structures, probably saves material and easy to remove structure. I understand this will probably take longer to optimize.
Medium term – everything here is focused more or less during curing. I only briefly mentioned this during our meeting and I apologize if this idea did not get through, but ultimately I think we can both agree that it is really sad to see a good model finish but warp and get destroyed in the cure. Everything here is focused on getting an accurate cure, especially with engineering materials and things known to warp during curing:
A. A cure allowing one to hang the part off the plate and remain like the Form wash, except for curing may be desirable. This allows the support material (seemingly optimized for tension forces anyways) to remain taught and pull the model into a more accurate shape rather than turning into wet spaghetti and collapsing under a heavy part and warping the model. I would buy this, but of course I am for a still for the most part curing on supports. Testing probably required.
B. I mention low temperature curing, but the real point of this is accurate curing off-supports, maybe a stronger UV oven like fast cure but for all materials. If I can just blast like the engineering parts (even for a longer duration) without heat causing the green part to deform, allowing me to achieve similar properties but bypass the “danger” of having to actively heat up the green part actively and pray, I would but this even faster. Like I said before, a lot of competitive materials to Formlabs Tough and such utilize this cure process (no heat, strong UV only) already: * https://www.loctiteam.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/W00834.pdf ]]
I will mention that I have to orient even flat and normally easily printable things angled upwards and weld them down with supports to ensure they cure accurately, don’t remember if I mentioned this point. Obviously removing support post cure sucks more.
If the “short term” stuff can be solved, I would turn around and recommend the system. If the “medium term” stuff can be solved, this system would deliver the experience DLPs and SLAs 6-figure printer companies make for the most part for a fraction of the price.
Let’s talk my opinions of long term. Don’t obsess over these, these are nice to have but not super essential. Long term means long term:
A. I mention stacking, this is a mature idea; yes, it is niche and wastes material, however, DLPs from the 90’s and 2000’s do this already, I have seen 15+ year old stacks off an Envisiontec printer and things like materialize magics modules offer this capability too. I believe if Formlabs offer a version of this baked into Preform a lot of people will use it. I imagine your dentist friends will be very happy to print this at the end of the day:
B. I intend to use mSLA/ DLP or maybe SLS in the future to completely replace any kind of FDM. I think there needs to be one practical long term environmentally stable material where it can truly replace like an ABS/ASA thermoplastic outside or inside. I will eventually dip my tops into Formlabs Flame retardant, and I know rigid is good because they are more glass than resin, but they cannot take any impact. I don’t need it to be even as high performance like a nylon 12, just something as strong and impact resistant like reasonably good ASA plastic and environmentally stable. I don’t care if a little more work is involved, so long it’s not PU. Look at basically any of Carbon’s dual cure stuff or anything here: https://move.forward-am.com/hubfs/LFS%20Documentation/General/Printer%20Workflows/LFS_Stratasys_3d_printer_workflow.pdf?hsLang=en
Hopefully that clears some ideas up.