Universal Cartridge

Support & Troubleshooting Form 3/3+
1

Hi all

I recently bought Form 3 and I’m thinking to use ALW resins.
To do this I will use the universal cartridge.

Anyone has experience with it? Is is recomended?
As the printer connected always to the network, will it inform Formlabs that a non-original resin is used? and what is their approach about it?

Thanks all

2

Should be fine.

I have a couple and used them fine on both Form2/3.

Just need to watch the rubber valve of your cartridge. After a while of using. it may get old fail off and all the resin will drown your printer.

3

As an alternative you can put your ALW resin in an empty formlabs resin cartridge.

As long as there is reasonably close alternative between your resin choice and some formlabs resin, I find this works well.

This helps avoid the valve problem that ashtree mentioned. The downside is you do have to occasionally purchase formlabs resins.

4

There are aftermarket bite valves for sale so you can replace them once in a while.

This only works for less than 1 liter of resin.
Buy the aftermarket valves and replace them every 3 liter or so and it’s cheaper than refilling used cartridges.

5

Who sells the aftermarket bite valves?

I suppose one could try printing them out of Flex80, as well.

My impression is you can use more than 1 liter of resin in a used cartridge. I suspect the figure is closer to 2L or 3L. I haven’t had a resin cartridge become unusable, yet.

6

You can get chinese ones on aliexpress and amazon(search for bite valve).
The company “CamelBak” is manufacturing the bitevalve that Formlabs is using. They are used for water bottles. Dimensions are exactly the same.

I’ve seen people print the valves as well, this works too!

1 Like
7

Thanks all

8

@rybu If you just add more resin to an empty resin cartridge, wouldn’t the sensor it there tell you it’s empty? Or it will just work? If it works, then why do people need to buy the universal cartridge?

9

It works for a while. After about 4 or 6 refills the printer says the cartridge is empty.

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10

Can you point me to the page of the grey resin v4 that works? I want to buy one asap

11

Also how do you clean the original cartridge? Just pour the old resin out by unscrewing the vent cap and putting the cartridge upside down?

12

If you go to a resin manufacturer page (say, like ApplyLabWorks) they tell you which FL cartridge it works best with.

I mostly buy their engineering resins, and several of those use the FL grey cartridges – or at least they did a few years ago. I haven’t bought any new resin in about a year.

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13

ApplyLabWorks charges so much for shipping! $25…

So I’m thinking of buying from Amazon. Does this look right to you?

14

I refilled the original Formlabs V4 Grey resin cartridge with ALW resin, but the Fom 3+ only says it has <250l left. After using it once to print something, it went to no resin left, despite there being more resin in the cartridge. This is not what I’m hearing from folks here. How can I extend the re-usability of the cartridge?