Good day.
I am thinking about purchasing a Form1+ printer. Its going to cost around 6,500 AUD (I’m in Australia) for the printer, extra resins bottles, extra vats, shipping, and tax. Its quite a lot of money so I was hoping to get feedback from those who already have a Form1+.
Have the previous issues with the Form1 been addressed with the Form1+? Are you getting consistent prints?
The resin bottles are 179 USD per litre. I am assuming 1 cm3 of resin will print 1 cm3 as well. So (not including the cost of the vat, shipping nor tax) that would mean that it costs 0.18 USD per cm3 (rounded), right? Does the Preform software calculate the amount of resin to be used by a print? And does it calculate the amount of support material used as well?
I’d like to thank those who reply in advance.
Cheers!
Yes, the preform software calculates the total part volume (I’m almost certain that includes the supports).
PreForm does calculate the volume including supports.
For a more detailed cost calculation please check my post here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LZ_b3Xvfpn-uqXxIvKVncErPCxF8S0Uv4PkrAAtocMs/edit?usp=sharing
There are other costs besides the resin and trays that you need to take into consideration.
I’m new with my Form 1+ and on the learning curve at the moment.
I have to add… .if it is good or not… really depends on what you need to get done, or what you intend do do with it.
At the moment I’m thinking I should have saved some more money and invested in a Roland MDX-40a.
I had looked into the Roland MDX 40 A and found design flaws and limitation on materials to be a big downside for a machine of that price.
The 4th axis is driven on a lathe type jig which is on round rails and aluminum frame making it deflect in the middle. Fine for light cutting wax but anything else it will have problems.
Other Major issue I had was the x axis is belt driven and not on a ball screw. I have know idea why they can’t put another $150-$200 for a ball screw into a $12,000 machine.
Another downside to that mill is there is no automatic tool changer so if you want a fine finish it can take forever. The only descent machine they have is their highest end and I’m sure theres lots of competition out there that have better machines. Don’t get me wrong, Roland is a nice company but some of their machines are less than par.
I’ve had my Form1+ for less than a month, overall I think it is a good purchase. As with all SLA systems there is a little learning curve with regards to part orientation and resin handling. There are some basic rules to follow to get good prints as you will see on the forums here.
I am blown away with the surface quality, usually print at 50micron and the surface needs little or no finishing. Model touch-up, repair or adhesion is done with raw resin and a 405nm laser pointer. I use a focusable one with a rechargeable battery that ran me about $20usd from NewEgg.
The PreForm software does some nice repairs automatically and overall the process is much easier than setting up any cnc machine.
Thanks for the replies.
@Nicolas_Gonzalez_Gar: I do understand that I may have to design my stuff with the limitations of the Form1+ in mind. But what I would like to know is if the Form1+ has been printing reliably with no errors due to mechanical issues like the galvos, mirrors, laser, servos, etc. I do understand that things can fail for many reasons. I just want to know if on the hardware side the Form1+ is now reliable. I’m not new to 3D printing. I have a Replicator2 (heavily modified), a Robox, and a Mojo. I got tired of tweaking the Replicator2 so it is now sitting idle. The Robox has some great potential, but I’m still working out some kinks, I just hope it will not be as fiddly as the Replicator2. That is the reason why I bought the Mojo, an expensive machine, true, but reliable. If only their print material were not so expensive! Its around 0.50 AUD per cm3. I just printed a Terminator T-800 head model and I calculated that it cost me around 120 AUD to make just on print and support material. I’m mainly after a reliable printer that can print cheaper than the Mojo.
@KenCitron: Thanks for your input. Can I ask how many prints you’ve made on your Form1+ so far? So far, have you had any hardware issues?
Like I said I have the Form1 for less than a month but 0 mechanical defects. I’m about 30 prints in and most are successful. Print failures are on my side due to general handling of resin and print orientation with the supports. Majority of my prints are successful now since I have a better feel for the machine, software and lots of support here. I tend to push equipment beyond it’s means and so far very happy with the purchase.
Form1+1 by no means a FDM. Parts generated on it are smoother than the polyjet systems but require support structures for overhangs whereas polyjet systems print the support as a negative of the model at the same time as the model.
With a little thought you can print just about anything.
On the consumable side your talking about $0.21 cm³ USD and the PreForm software calculates the supports as well as the object.
See if Formlabs can print you a sample to see if it works for your needs.
@KenCitron : I’ve seen the incredible prints that can be achieved by the Form1+ so in terms of the quality of print, I’m more than satisfied with it. What I’m more concerned about is hardware failures like what the old Form1 has. Its going to be a pain having to send the printer back from here in Australia.
Form1+ hasn’t been out all that long to really tell. I’m assuming there were vast improvements since the first version.
That’s what I am worried about, that there are not enough people who use Form1+s to really put it through its paces. I was hoping that there would be quite a few Form1+ owners here on this forum. But I guess if you logically think about it, most people here would have the old Form1 and probably would not fork out more money to buy a Form1+. But maybe there would be a lot of people who have Form1s that have had the upgrade to Form1+. So if you are out there, I would love to hear about your experiences. 
@Edmond_Dyogi, anecdotally, quite a few of the printers being discussed here are the Form 1+ or upgrades. It’s possible that people aren’t always specifying which model they’re working with. As @KenCitron mentions, there were substantial improvements in the Form 1+, not only in print speed, but also in machine reliability.
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I started out with a Form 1 and had problems making prints consistently. Sometimes they would work, sometimes they would partially work, and sometimes they would utterly fail to print.
I sent back my printer and got it upgraded to the Form1+. and for a while all went well. But just recently, I tried one of my more ambitious prints, and only got half of it. Oddly, this wasn’t the same failure pattern I’d noticed previously, where the bottom of the print would work but the top would fail to print. This time, the left half of the print worked great, but the right half stopped printing about 1/3 of the way up.
On the print previous to that, it basically worked, but half the base detached itself from the build plate. It still printed, but was distorted. I have to say that this machine works nicely when it works, but when it doesn’t it’s difficult to figure out what’s going wrong, or how to deal with it.
Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com
Can you post photos?
Generally I have found that when the base doesn’t adhere, you need to use the Fine Tuning (I believe it is in the Help menu) to LOWER the build platform (0.1mm increments). It usually doesn’t take much to get it to adhere. If you go TOO far, your supports will fail so don’t get too ambitious. Tweak a tiny bit at a time until everything is stable.
One thing many miss is using the build slider on the side of the PreForm. Take a careful look at sections that start but have no supports below. The auto supports don’t always see all of the overhangs especially on high poly count complex models. A small section that is unsupported is a guaranteed way of killing the rest of the model.
As far as a model failing part way up where it should be fine, I would think that it might be a resin issue where mixing is a problem. I haven’t had that yet so I try to keep the resin mixed up and strained just before printing. So far so good.
I have owned and used the Roland MDX-40a for three years now.
With many hundreds of hours of experience, I can honestly say - it’s the biggest piece of SH** ever made. I keep it only because of all the time and money invested in it. I found that is best to use a CAM G-code generator rather than use their junk software. At least, I can make parts with it now. No metals, ever. Only plastics and wax. Some chemical woods.
Having said that; even though it is belt driven it does an amazing job of accuracy and repeatability. But due to the lame motors and drives, speed is agonizing slow. For example: Cutting ABS plastic with a 1mm end mill, your max out at .5mm cutting and feed of less than 30 linear feet per minute. Without the tool changer is a pain, but you can still program stops and then manually change and index the finishing tools.
Then machine is poorly designed and the engineers never had the operator in mind during the design process which adds to the frustration of using this boat anchor. Lastly, Roland customer service for this line of equipment is the worst I’ve ever experienced.
I’ve owed large computer machine tools (Mazak, Amada, Cincinnati, etc) I’ve owned 3D printers, Stratasys Dimension SST1200es for one. So, I’m not a stranger to how well a machine should be built, operate, and be supported.
I hope if anyone is reading this with just a hint in mind of buying a Roland mill, RUN - do not walk away.
-c-
Good to see such frank advice.
There is a reason that good CNC mills are hundreds of thousands of dollars…
I have been looking at buying the MDX-40A to go along side my form 1+. If I can live with manually changing the tools and the slow cutting time, would it still be worth looking at? What about the new SRM-20?
I almost bought one but backed out because of design flaws and limitations on materials.
There are desktop mills that are much sturdier in that price range and even less that even have auto tool changers. I wouldn’t set one up in my living room or next to my desk because they can be noisy but you can cut many metals on them as well as materials the Roland machines can.
It would be nice to get something like a tormach since it’s similar in pricing and offers a lot more, unfortunately I don’t have the space for it. I can live without machining metals as most of my projects involve molds, electronic enclosures and milling circuit boards and there is a techshop near by, I have space for the mdx40a or a shopbot desktop, but it might be worth purchasing the srm-20 and save money for something better down the road unless there is a better alternative.
Sorry I didn’t pick up on the replies to this thread until now. If you want to talk about desktop mills, I’d be delighted to do that, I specialize in miniature US-made CNC equipment. (Visit my site if you’d like to learn more about them; I’ve also got an extensive set of annotated links for that realm.) But we really should start a new thread for that.
As for my Form1+ experience, it still hasn’t been good. I’ve attached some pictures as requested. On one, the supports printed but the piece itself didn’t. Then it quit on some kind of software error before the file finished uploading. The same file yielded the results in the other picture - it’s supposed to be a symmetrical piece, but a big section is missing. I got somewhat discouraged after that, and did other things for a couple of weeks. Now, getting back to it, I decided to strain my resin, but the vat is stuck - it won’t slide out. Has anybody else had that happen? Should I start a new thread about it?
Andrew Werby
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Thanks for the link, if I do get a Taig I’ll keep you in mind.