We have a lot of jewelry prints that have detail on both sides, such as rings, pendants, bracelets, etc., and so far one side on all of them does not print well on the Form1. We tried positioning them at an angle, and trying different support settings, but we finally came to the conclusion that it’s the way the laser cures the layers on the Form1 that is causing the problems.
This is a simple test file we made with some text, and printed it in various positions, and you can clearly see that the laser over-cures past the previous layers and leaves a cured coating of resin all over the details and smoothing them out. This problem is a big one, not just for jewelry, but all applications, because even if you are printing a statue with high detail, it will impact the quality of the details printed.
In the attached pictures you can see that the text on one side is cured nicely and it’s relatively sharp (printed at the 50 grey setting), but on the other side of the model its smoothed out and just looks really bad. And this is on the auto-orient version of the print.
Do you any of you experience problems like these? Please share your opinions and photos of your prints.
I think Form Labs should acknowledge that there is a problem with the resin formulations, or the curing times, etc., instead of suggesting that there might be something wrong with our printer. They already replaced my printer once, but I am still getting the same results.
The only solution in my opinion is to release a resin with a higher pigment (or stopping power for the light), so that the laser beam does not cure previously cured layers. Each layer thickness setting may need a different resin specifically formulated for that thickness.
For now, we can only print things that don’t have a lot of detail, or only have detail on one side.
We hoped that the grey resin would be a better choice for high detail printing, but the results are identical to the clear.
If it’s a software issue, then this stuff should be high on their priority list to be fixed. Tradeshows can wait.
Or at least give us control over the curing time setting, layer thickness, etc, in the software so that we can test with other 3rd party resins.
