I’m thinking of using tough1500 instead of std Grey for railway models, mainly because of the brittleness of small parts in grey.
Can anyone suggest the pros and cons of using tough1500 for this type of application?
The widget at the bottom of this page may give you a sense of the relative material properties: 3D Printing Materials: Engineering Resins
Engineering resins are a little more expensive than Standard, and may wear the tank faster. For the Form 2 an LT tank is recommended. On the Form 3 a v2 tank is required for Tough 2000, but apparently not for Tough 1500. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed the engineering resins saturate my alcohol a little faster.
Technically the Tough family of resins can’t achieve quite as fine detail as Standard, and Formlabs recommends larger support contacts. Since they aren’t as stiff, you can’t get quite the same overhangs. They also don’t support 25um layer height.
That said, I’ve personally always been quite satisfied with the level of detail from Tough prints, and I’ve cranked the supports way down with success. I think Tough 1500 (for more durability and a bit more flex) or Tough 2000 (for more rigidity and possibly detail) would be reasonable choices for your model. Keep in mind super-thin features such as long, finger-like protrusions will always be a little delicate.
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Thanks,
What I’m particularly interested in is support removal. I have got the grey resin supports to the stage were I can more or less twist the model off the supports. My experience with durable and playing with the tough1500 sample suggests that most of the supports will need to be cut away, which will add to the post processing time and cost.
I’m well aware of the problems with thin features. I seem to spend most of my time in a battle between scale fidelity and making the models customer-proof.
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I would agree with that, any high accuracy work I’ve done in though 1500 required the supports to be cut. Other wise you will run into the supports taking extra material with them. leaving pits or craters in the surface. The strength of the parts is amazing after curing. The detail and speed are also are largely improved over the other engineering resins.
Another downside that i have found with tough 1500, is with large cross sectional areas. The raft tends to not adhere to the build plate partially, warping prints severely. I have found that this is true for rafts that need more that 25% of the build plate on the form 2. I am still experimenting to see if there is anything that can be changed to fix this issue. I hope this helps.
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