We’ve had a working Formlabs 2 for a whole week, today. And I read the “similar topics” It says, “castable with no post cure” but apparently it’s not. First cast was 2 simple anniversary rings. One silver dipped in “react-shun”, one silver post cured in nail salon UV for about 4 hours, one 14ktY straight from print. Two silvers are reasonable, 14kt is an unmentionable word and unusable. This was a test - investment mixed together, burnout together, ramped to specs. On one advise we got a toaster oven and warmed low for 1/2 hour and it cracked badly - the advice said this could happen. Tomorrow we go longer at much less heat.
We are a pro shop and can’t be wondering if it’s going to work this time or not. Any thoughts here, feedback? Yes, we are newbies but our test was dramatic - silver was decent or better, gold was garbage. Not to be mean here, but “The guy in Detroit casts for me and it’s fine” just isn’t useful to me…
I’m so sorry to hear you’re having some issues with your casting! That’s definitely not what we want to hear. I would recommend getting in touch with our support team ASAP and we’d be happy to help sort through what might be preventing you from getting the results you want.
You can find them at the link below, and you should expect to hear back within a day. If there are any questions I can answer in the meantime please don’t hesitate to ask.
I have been using castable wax resin now since it came out last summer.
The good news is that I never ever had problems printing parts with this resin. However, casting results can be unpredictable as you mention. Some pieces come out fine, others, a disaster. To be fair, I use the services of the best casting house in Montreal - they are used to casting many different resins. They will not change the burnout schedule to fit specific needs of particular products, so I expect a castable resin to stand professional casting procedures without requiring very specific adjustments. That said, maybe it will work for those who will carry out their own castings and adapt the process to the wax castable requirements… I haven’t heard from those users yet, so I am not sure about it either.
I am now beginning to re-consider using Bluecast again, the third supplier castable resin that I used before and never had problems with. It doesn’t require curing and produces clean castings every time.
Thanks Marci. My concern is that Formlabs says that the purple doesn’t require post processing but it seems that it does. The casting failures are investment breakdown that is typical of resin-investment boundary layering. It’s not that I blame them at all - it is a nice machine. But we in the trade need to know how to handle this stuff with consistent results and that means Formlabs needs to do their homework and get that data to us… Next door to us they use the blue castable - and they post process it…