Form 3

bags for travel

So the large majority of my printing experience is with Prusa 3D printers. I've had about 4 different ones. Over the year my business partner and I got a Form 3 for some projects that required tighter tolerances and much cleaner finished products for manufacturing. Were it not for the costs of the resin from formlabs I'd be using just that 3D printer all the time. 

Now that being said. It's not a crazy expensive product considering the number of prints you can get out of each container of resin. The print quality is absolutely stunning and the minute details you can include in your print are fantastic. 

On the Form 3 I've printed replacement tractor parts for a caterpillar back hoe. I've printed products that we sent to manufacturing and the quality was so spot on you can't tell the 3D printed part from the injection molded part, other than the fact that one is resin and one is plastic. I've printed small light fixtures. I've printed parts with air vents that are .5mm in diameter with no clogging issues in the vents.

I've only ever had two failed prints out of six containers of resin and the only reason they failed is because my model was not set up right. A very simple error.

If you can afford the resin at $150 per container it's absolutely worth it. 

The software "PreForm" is super user friendly and setup is a breeze. There is a ton of documentation online to help you out if you get stuck and the tech support is very responsive and very helpful.

The only downside is having to have a separate tank for each type of resin. So if you use white, you need a tank for white, if you use clear, you need a tank for clear etc. It's really convenient to store the resin this way between prints and makes swapping very easy, but again this is not hobby pricing unless you have cash to blow. Each tank will cost you $150 as well.

Oh and I just remembered one more. Clean up of the resin off of the parts kind of sucks, It's not that it that hard, it can just get messy and when you are used to pulling a part off of a Prusa and it's good enough to go, that's not the case here. You need to clean it and clean the parts and clean them good in rubbing alcohol. After you've cleaned them you need to let them dry thoroughly otherwise they can have a bit of tack to the surface. Once they are cured though. Awesome!! 

For a small business or someone who is designing parts for manufacturing, I can't recommend this printer enough. Very reliable, very easy to use.

... especially in this price range!

One can start the printing and then leave the printer alone until finish.

We never had even one problem - the slicer is nearly perfect. The only thing one can do is a little Try-Out for lowering the support. But that´s a "critic" on a verrrryyy high level ^^.

We would (and maybe will) buy it again !

we just got this printer and thus far it has blown my mind. the best purchase ever. NO REGRETS!!!

I used huge money to get miniatures devices but failed to print the dimension of the device around 300 micrometers. The company also gave us a very short time for training and installation for my students. 

Printed company Logo, actually printed customer production part as sample to use for prototyping and setup, again straightforward and easy. 

I dabbled in FDM printing when it first became a thing 5 or so years ago and I just never liked it. The surface finish from FDM just always looked irredeemably awful to me. So much so that essentially washed my hands of the whole business. But as I got more into making electronic things, I wanted more and more to be able to design and create custom enclosures for them. And so I decided to take another look at the state of things. The Form 3 was, in the Spring of 2019, on the cusp of being released, so I got in line.

There are a couple of flaws that I've found since starting. The big one is that it's shocking to me that this is Form's 3rd SLA printer and a catastrophic tank failure (which I've had one of) won't just safely drain out of the printer - or into an alarmed resin trap - in a way that's trivial to clean.

But through it all, the support from Form has been absolutely above and beyond expectations - and this is  their free e-mail support. There is some turnaround time, but it's always helpful, and they've been very quick to replace cartridges and tanks that have failed or otherwise caused problems.

Perhaps that immaculate support justifies the premium price on their resins. Certainly in 2020 there's no other justification for basic resins being $150/liter. Tanks costing $150... I can sort of get past that, but the resin really either ought to be cheaper or they ought to allow third party resins in some way.

Of course, the surface finish is the whole reason I justified the $3500 purchase price, and for the most part I've been quite satisfied. The community forums do have people talking about complains about fine surface detail distortion, but I haven't noticed it (probably because my designs tend to be large and simple). I've printed 20 liters of resin and had a success rate of around 85%. The tradeoff for the better surface quality is time. Even at 100 micron layers the time required for prints is substantial. Individual layers, for the most part, print much faster than with FDM, but there are far more layers with SLA's greater layer density.

The only other complaint I can articulate is the limited build volume. It isn't enough of an issue for me personally since most of the things I print either fit fine or can be printed in sections and "welded" together with resin and curing. On a couple of occasions, though, the build volume has required me to shrink things a little bit.

IT IS VERY VERY EXPENSIVE TO BUY/RUN, I HAD TO GET A SECOND JOB TO PAY FOR IT;

BUT THE VARIETY OF MATERIALS WAS A DEAL BREAKER FOR ME

AND THE EXTREME PRECISION IS LIKE A FREE BONUS :)