I’m curious about others’ experience with open material license on the Form 4 or 4L.
We’ve got several Form 4 units now doing production & prototyping work, and are considering options for an upcoming production project.
Several of our parts are not conducive to hollow designs and the part design (~4 cubic inch) requires so much resin that it isn’t financially viable even at a $60 resin cost.
Unfortunately injection molding, blow molding, and urethane casting face some challenges on this part - due to several constraints.
We’ve been producing these parts using sand casting and machining, but this leaves several ongoing challenges, as well as the high part-cost for a sand cast aluminum product.
This has us exploring cost-savings of an open license with lesser expensive 3rd party resins for heavy production.
The current more modest license ($2500 now) becomes a sane trade-off, if it opens the door for us to use sub-$20 resins with semi-comparable results - the license fee would be covered within 12L of printing which would likely be a weekly volume.
Does anybody have experience with this? In particular with say the Elegoo resins?
This would enable us to run the Form4 in our current ecosystem, with 3rd party resins tuned for specific production.
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Very interesting, have you tried to just put a similar spec resin into the machine and running it with some edits on the current print settings editor?
I ask this because many people thinks it’s super complex to make resin work but at least in my experience you just need to run some tests and know what is happening in the process to being able to pull it off.
Consider that material consistency does come with a price, and a $20 resin will definitely be translated into the final parts properties I struggle with this everyday with customers pushing for lower costs and not being able to understand that material price constraint apply. The last project we did consisted of producing 1000 25 cm hollow parts and we used anycubic resin on Mega 8k machines, we needed to alter the exposure settings because of differences between machines UV light power, two of the four machines needed to increment .5 seconds in order to produce parts correctly.
We did had a failure rate of around 10% incomplete parts, defects parts coming out of the platform etc. But overall it was successful, consider all this because in the end if you experience more failures and final part quality is not what needed you will be loosing money for choosing a cheap low quality material instead of a good one.
In the end it’s all about $$$ but if you show this and explain it thoroughly to the customer maybe there is a chance to charge what is needed instead of what is expected.
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I’ve thought about just pouring some in and ‘winging it’, but I need consistent, repeatable production.
I’m not sure how i’d be able to just keep printing, without somehow hacking the system into thinking it’s got a bottomless tank of resin?
In the end, I need to be able to turn out 200pc/day, without issue, so I think the value would be in having the ability to tweak the system to match a resin for best results.
Yes, the $2500 seems like a steep price for having it unlocked, but i’m willing to pay it, if it allows me to bring a product into production which would otherwise NEVER make this market. If I can’t figure out a way to get this into 3D printing at an economical rate, it’ll stay in the casting industry, and the customer will lose market share due to design and production constraints.
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We use the open material license currently with Loctite resins and it works great even better when the company has already verified the material and has all the settings available, but it is great if you’re looking for something that formlabs doesn’t offer and it is definitely worth the price.
But are loctite materials available as low as $20 per liter?
Oh definitely not that’s is just what we are using so far with open material
And there are for sure more options, but the point from @Davidwedge is to have a resin for $20 or less that works.In my experience the same happened with filaments when people wanted low prices, you could find the material but in the end it was just issues and problems so you really needed to invest a little more. Maybe knowing a little more of the application and parts being produced could help, there is a chance someone already produced something similar.