Hello guys, if anyone has a 3L they are looking to sell, I am extremely interested. I have been fighting with an Epax x156 and it clearly is not up to the task of daily shop use. I’m attempting to print exhaust manifolds in wax resin for low volume investment casting.
Thank you!
the formlabs is not what I would call up to daily shop use. You are better off paying someone to make the print, and let them fight the printer. I had two printers break within 10 prints total. these things suck.
Well crap, that is extremely unfortunate to hear. I guess I was overly optimistic that the success rate would be higher than the chinese lcd/msla printers considering the cost difference and the supposed industrial specifications. I’ve had enough frustration with the Epax unit I was hoping for essentially zero frustration with the Formlabs. I appreciate the feedback sir!
They do not suck. All mechanical machines suck or have some sort of issues but if you stick with it and find out there quirks they work amazingly well. If your not a patient person than i would suggest not getting into 3d printing and development. It takes a lot of time and effort to make all this work.
I am happy with my Formlabs products. You just have to find a happy spot.
I absolutely support what Titon is saying.
Titon’s comment is spot on. Formlabs makes a very good machine for the price. Yes, there are issues with it but no 3D printer is perfect. I think one of the issues most users has is a lack of patience like Titon wrote and the expectation that the Formlabs is going to be a print and go type printer. It’s not. It will take a while to learn how to get the best from the printer for the print one is making but with some experience the success rate and quality is excellent.
Thank you very much for the feedback gentlemen! I am a patient person, but this would be a business tool and at this price ballpark, I cannot afford to mess with it like a couple hundred dollar chinesium FDM printer. Tweaking settings in the beginning is one thing, but it needs to reliably produce the same part 90+% of the time for low volume production in order to make business sense. Otherwise I can just let 3D Systems print the SLA quick cast patterns and build that into the part cost. But as always, the more I can do in house the better.
I just crunched the numbers and on a particular part I want to investment cast, 3D Systems quoted $74 each where the slicing software says $12.65/ea even at the $249/liter Formlabs resin cost.
That is because the 3D Systems machines print really good. For me, those are the best… from SLA resins to Titanium materials.
If you are printing roughly the same type of parts repeatedly it will not take you long to figure out the optimal settings, orientation of the part, and the correct resin to use. In my company we use both a Form 2 and a Form 3 for production use and once we figured out the quirks of the machines both of been very reliable.
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