I've been 3d printing molds on a sla printer and making injection molded parts on my injection molding machines. A much better approach
Formlabs Form 4 3D Printer Beats Injection Molding Machine in Speed and Quality [video]
41–49 of 49 posts
Re: Formlabs Form 4 3D Printer Beats Injection Molding Machine in Speed and Quality [video]
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lower cost printers are absolutely using LCDs with an LED UV light source. These resin curing printers are pretty darn cheap as well, and have a ton of resolution. They also excel on volume as they do expose the entire plate at once and don’t require scanning a laser around. The material you get out of such a printer is of course entirely different from an injection molded part.
Yeah, I’m a pretty big 3D printer enthusiast. I’m surprised they shifted from lasers to LCD. I guess the laser and galvo setup was too expensive. Probably also easier and cheaper to ship new “Low Force Display” for people with formcare. End of the day, no matter what these vendors say, the crystals in LCD get damaged by UV light and would need to be replaced eventually.
It also opens up a whole bunch of material options. If you go to resin providers websites they have only a few resins for laser printers and tons and tons for lcd printers.
Re: Formlabs Form 4 3D Printer Beats Injection Molding Machine in Speed and Quality [video]
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
The video chooses a very slow injection moulding machine; creates a mould that only produces two parts per cycle even though the machine could clearly handle far more; then has to use four of their machines and a human to match its pace. Yes, 3d printing is vastly faster if you measure the time for me to get a part from the machine on my desk vs ordering a mold and shipping the results from Shenzhen. But that was tru…
What is the problem with 4 machines? its still 4x cheaper then the injection molding machine. you could buy 16 for same price
They don't want to focused on price if one machine is using bulk pellets and the other UV resin. It is many orders of magnitude more then 4x and much larger over the lifetime then the initial purchase price.
Not to mention an injection molding machine would be expected to run at least 20 years; which seems high for a Form 4 still being in full use.
Re: Formlabs Form 4 3D Printer Beats Injection Molding Machine in Speed and Quality [video]
#44This is borderline flag-worthy material (the post). Two main things missing:
- What other commenters have pointed out already: Post processing time for the 3D printed parts (as an aside: the quality of a 3D printed would never match that of an injection molded part).
- That the injection mold's mold in an ideal setup for such a small part would have multiple units per mold, thus with each injection one could produce 10+ parts of this small part shown in the video.
Obviously, 3D printing has its own advantages over injection molding as well. But for mass production of highly-repeatable parts (eg: not highly-customizable ("made to order") items such as dental related, or shoe insole related, for which 3D printing works well in mass production), plastic injection molding beats 3D printing hands down.
Re: Formlabs Form 4 3D Printer Beats Injection Molding Machine in Speed and Quality [video]
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also ignore making the mold, so I guess that evens it out? Mold tools are very expensive and commit you to a lot of design constraints as well as lock you in to minimum production cycles that make sense. I agree its not fair, thought. Given the costs, I'm surprised they didn't do more printers, too.
Design constraints aren't an issue for prototype runs, since you'll have the same constraints for the production mold. Actually, now that I'm writing this out.... the constraints issue is a plus, since it's a dry run of how the actual production parts will be produced. Doing the 1000pc run on a 3d printer won't expose an 'oops' that can't actually be made in a molded part.
I agree with you, but what I was getting at was that if you're just going to print the parts for the entire run, you aren't constrained by the issues like draft, etc. Obviously, if your run is 10,000,000 pieces, then you have no choice, but if your run is <100,000, you might be better off making different design decisions and just getting more printers.
Re: Formlabs Form 4 3D Printer Beats Injection Molding Machine in Speed and Quality [video]
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seriously, that injection molding machine is slooooooow , and I produced parts faster in middle school in our shop class with an injection molding machine that was entirely manual and looked to be from the 20s, the 1920s. They are printing a full bed of parts for each 3D printer run, but only two per injection cycle? And what's with that giant spike of flash on their injection molded parts? This video is so disingenu…
The video says 24s per injection molded part I think. What is a fast time?
Depends on the plastic and the wall thickness of the part. We don't know what the requirements actually are, but I bet they would be a way to make 4 times as many parts in a cycle half as long if you had to.
Re: Formlabs Form 4 3D Printer Beats Injection Molding Machine in Speed and Quality [video]
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open platform allows you to use non formlabs resins, it works fine but tbh what you pay for with formlabs is getting the perfect prints every time. The form 3 works so well because all of the resins have such optimized settings and you can just let it print without worrying about issues. If you want to use some other resin I doubt you would see as high of a success rate.
> but tbh what you pay for with formlabs is getting the perfect prints every time. My 45 email chain with Formlabs would beg to differ. I'm being a little bit silly. The reason for the (over)engineering of their products is to be as turn key as possible, and this includes materials. I give them credit for the ambition to try to be the "Apple" of 3d printing. I'm not 100% negative on Formlabs, and they've certainly pl…
Yeah for sure, I see where you are coming from. I have used a form 3 a lot (4k of materials) and have my own form 2 and for my uses it has worked super well. There are certainly blind spots but for the consumer they are targeting who wants to print parts and not think about the details it is pretty slick.
I think for what it is worth formlabs has a pretty unique position in the market where their printers are low enough in price where they have to compete with enthusiast printers which makes it tough. If what you are looking for is a machine that you can tweak and set up exactly how you want it, formlabs isn't ideal. But for people who are not interested in working on a printer and just want parts to appear in the printer I d not think that anyone else does that better.
Re: Formlabs Form 4 3D Printer Beats Injection Molding Machine in Speed and Quality [video]
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Open platform allows you to use non formlabs resins, it works fine but tbh what you pay for with formlabs is getting the perfect prints every time. The form 3 works so well because all of the resins have such optimized settings and you can just let it print without worrying about issues. If you want to use some other resin I doubt you would see as high of a success rate.
I guess "allows" in the same way HP "allows" you to only use their ink. Fantastic, and only (at least) $6k for the privilege of using my hardware as I see fit
yeah the 6k is wild for sure, if you are looking to not use formlabs resin why would you buy a formlabs printer though?
The biggest advantage of formlabs in my mind is the ecosystem, the resins just work out of the box and you do not have to try and fine tune things. If I wanted to use Loctite or some other resin company (price per L is comparable) I would just buy a anycubic printer.
I do get where you are coming from though, I am not a drm fan but I am just curious why you would not just go with a different printer.
Re: Formlabs Form 4 3D Printer Beats Injection Molding Machine in Speed and Quality [video]
#49I've had white plastic SLA prints (not Formlabs afaik) go very yellow in less than a few months, curious if this is common with white photosensitive resins vs plastic you might get injection moulded?
Have not had this in my experience with formlabs. they recommend that you use a protective coating spray for parts that are outside in direct uv, I have never used it though and my parts have lasted fine.
As always depends on the material, I think the glass filled ones are better, the flexible ones are a little worse but it has never been an issue for me.