I pose the question above as I see a great deal of 3d modeling artist who have bought the form1 and are printing their creations. They all seem to have great results and the prints look beautiful with great surface qualities.
However, I have noticed that prints with planar features (architecture prints and mechanical parts) posted from users do not looks nearly as good as the characters and are often failed parts that exhibit poor surface finishes.
Therefore I was thinking that maybe the form 1’s SLA process is better for objects with many intricate details such as those found in characters, that hide imperfections etc, or that the peeling process is able to better handle irregular shapes rather then linear or straight shapes such as those often found in mechanical parts and architecture.
I have been playing with FDM printing for mechanical parts, and the lack of shrinking seems to also yield better / more accurate results. Again this could all be in me heard. What do you guys think?
A great discussion, Cesar!
In our engineering office, we currently have a “prosumer” FDM printer that we use to make prototypes of fixtures and nests and so on for parts that our machines handle. It works very well, and we see prints that match our CAD to +/0 0.05 mm. We bought a Form 1+ a few weeks ago hoping that we’ll see even better results. We haven’t received ours yet, so I can’t speak to the results, but I hope our line of thinking (SLA > FDM for accuracy) is true!
Here’s a photo of a part nest I made a little while back; that 44.98 mm dimension should be 45.0 mm, which is well within what I’d expect to see for a machined part.
I’d love to see some similar photos from prints from the Form 1, showing measured dimensions of critical features as compared to CAD.
@Iain_Hendry 0.05+/- mm is pretty good but I am not sure the form can get those results - maybe it can. I have to measure some parts and do a comparison.
I think part of the challenge with parts like the one you are showing on the form1 is the need of support and the peeling action which in my experience seems to have a hard time keeping straight edges.