The technology behind most resin 3D prints is referred to as stereolithography (SLA). The additive manufacturing technology converts liquid materials into solid parts by curing each layer with a light source in a process called vat photopolymerization. The light source is usually a UV laser or projector that cures the liquid resin into hardened plastic. SLA printing is considered to be one of the most widely used techniques in producing high-quality 3D prints such as models, prototypes, and production parts.
Why choose a desktop SLA printer?
The closed build environment and heated resin tank provides consistent conditions and better accuracy for each print. SLA creates parts with a smooth surface finish as soon as it’s done printing which is ideal for applications that require a flawless finish. It helps reduce finishing time as well since the parts can be easily sanded, polished, and painted. The smallest detail is much finer on SLA printers due to the 140 micron laser spot size on the Form 2 compared to 350 microns on industrial SLS printers and 250-800 microns on FDM machines.
In-house 3D printing can reduce costs by 50-90% when factoring in consumables, maintenance, labor, and depreciation of the machine. There is a turnaround time of hours instead of days or weeks with outsourced production. Desktop SLA 3D printers allow for accurate prototypes, rapid iterations, and earlier discovery of errors which all lead to better final results.
Formlabs – ‘Form 2’ Desktop SLA 3D printer
The Form 2 delivers high-resolution SLA prints that are significantly smoother and more detailed than other plastic 3D printing technologies. It enables you to print precise models with a smooth surface finish and helps save time and money during the design and manufacturing process.
Automated Resin Refill
Level sensing ensures your tank is automatically filled during printing. No more pausing for manual refills.
Resin Cartridge Recognition
The Form 2 automatically recognizes the resin type, configures settings, and allows you to keep track of resin supplies from your Dashboard.
Open Mode
Experiment with non-standard applications such as embedding objects in prints, creating lithopanes, and etching PCBs. It enables support with 3rd party resins.
Form 2 – SLA materials for different industries
Every industry has specific needs and applications for 3D printing. The stereolithography materials selection for desktop SLA 3D printers are built to address these varying needs of design and engineering groups.
Standard
Standard resins are ideal for rapid prototyping, product development, and general modeling applications. The resin provides high resolution, fine features, and a smooth surface finish and doesn’t require post-curing. The resins are available in greyscale, clear, white, and a color kit.
Engineering
Engineering resins are used to create functional parts for anything from assemblies to injection molds and have tough, durable, flexible, and temperature-resistant characteristics. They are used to simulate a range of injection-molded plastics to help designers and engineers conceptualize, prototype, and test final products.
Dental
Dental materials have specific applications that include orthodontic models, splints, retainers, diagnostic, biocompatible surgical guides, and educational models. These resins allow dental labs and practices to create a range of dental products in-house based on a patient’s intraoral scan or CBCT scan.
Jewelry
Jewelry prototypes can be made with SLA technology to create a fitting ring or try on piece. Castable resin is designed for direct investment casting to allow jewelers and casting houses to view the 3D print in-house or to create custom jewelry cost effectively.
Learn more about the Form 2 3D printer here or request a sample part here.
The truth is, the small footprint and the simple setup of a 3D printer, such as Formlabs’ Form 2 SLA desktop 3D printer can drastically streamline your design process and impact your business.
Businesses of all sizes have started to realize the need for scalable production and a fast return on investment – eventually turning to desktop 3d printers as a solution.
Desktop 3D printers make high precision 3D printing affordable for everyone, while they deliver a range of operational and business benefits.
Discover the 5 Business benefits of a 3D Desktop Printer.
1. Desktop 3D printers save you money
Desktop 3D printing empowers engineers and product designers to rapidly prototype in-house, saving time and costs at every stage of product development. Here’s how.
For starters, the low upfront costs of 3D printers represent just the tip of the many tangible benefits.
3D desktop printers come at a desktop price and are able to produce industrial quality parts. This allows the development of high-resolution prints for a fraction of the cost of traditional manufacturing.
A desktop printer can pay for itself by printing things or parts you would ordinarily outsource. This cuts out any potential outsourcing fees or shipping costs you might incur.
3D desktop printers also enable the ability to test parts for a device before mass production – quickly. This reduces the costs and risks associated with reworking a design and increases innovation.
You can also save money on material costs by using a 3d desktop printer. Desktop printers use raw materials that can be recycled and re-used in more than one build. Why not make the most out of the materials you paid for?
Affordable materials and accessible machine prices make 3D desktop printers a cost-effective and scalable digital solution for many businesses.
2. Desktop 3D printers save time
One of the greatest benefits of having a desktop 3D printer is speed.
Forget all the obstacles that come along with needing a replacement part from a backed-up manufacture. If you need a part you can create it. It’s that simple.
And if you already have a full sized industrial 3D printer… Well, that’s even better.
Desktop 3D printers can create custom fixtures, tools, and prototypes in a fraction of the time and cost of traditional methods. Why not boost your efficiency and manage multiple machines at once?!
3D desktop printers are designed to quickly integrate 3D printing into your workflow with a range of different materials.
3. Desktop 3D printers help design
With a 3D Desktop printer, you can rapidly develop, evaluate, and iterate a range of designs in-house.
This allows designers to have greater control over the final product.
For instance, additive manufacturing places a model in the hands of the designer in just a few hours.
This allows the designer to be able to continuously improve products and respond quickly and effectively to issues, perhaps by using jigs and fixtures.
3D Desktop printers also provide designers with design freedom.
Design freedom enables a team to quickly create, perfect, and optimize parts with complex geometries.
In fact, you could create small-batch runs or one-off custom solutions for comprehensive field and in-house testing before investing in expensive tooling for production.
By using 3D desktop printer, designers are able to entirely control and rapidly manipulate design.
4. Desktop 3D printers keep all engineering assets in-house
You work hard to keep your trade secrets, so why put any of them at risk.
By controlling all your engineering assets and keeping every process in-house you will reduce your risk.
Using an in-house 3d printer allows you to maintain control over your manufacturing process from beginning to end.
5. Desktop 3D printers don’t need specialized operators
3D Desktop printers don’t require any skilled machinists or machine operators during the building phase.
In fact, the machines follow a completely automated process to print parts. Therefore, anyone that can press a start button can manage the process.
Just imagine the ability to create exhibition-quality parts, in a range of materials with specific properties, with an easy to use machine.
Check out the most affordable, high-precision SLA 3D desktop printer on the market – the Form 2 by Formlabs… Or better yet.. request a free sample.
This is a guest post from our friends over on the Formlabs Blog.
What do Formula 1 race cars and Marine One have in common? Many of their high-performance drivetrain and engine components started life in Kapfenberg, a quiet little town nestled in the Austrian Alps.
Pankl Racing Systems specializes in developing and manufacturing engine and drivetrain components for racing cars, high-performance vehicles, and aerospace applications with more than 1,500 employees, and worldwide subsidiaries in Austria, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, Slovakia, and Japan.
Every single part that Pankl makes requires a series of custom jigs, fixtures and other tooling that are designed and fabricated specifically for that part. The result is a proliferation of custom tools, adding significant cost and complexity to the manufacturing process.
To fulfill tight production deadlines, process engineer Christian Joebstl and his team introduced stereolithography (SLA) 3D printing to produce custom jigs and other low-volume parts directly for their manufacturing line in the company’s new €36 million state-of-the-art manufacturing facility.
While 3D printing was initially met with skepticism, it turned out to be an ideal substitute to machining a variety of these tools, surprising even Pankl’s demanding engineers. In one case, it reduced lead time for jigs by 90 percent–from two to three weeks to less than a day – and decreased costs by 80-90 percent, leading to $150,000 in savings. Read on to learn how Joebstl and his team implemented their new 3D printing-based process.
Custom jigs in-use for motorcycle gear manufacturing
Pankl has been in the business for more than 30 years. Has 3D printing been a long-standing part of your practice?
Surprisingly, not at all. We didn’t have any 3D printers until less than a year ago. A colleague of mine had a request for a custom cover to hide some areas from impact in a shot peening machine. We used to buy parts like this from an external supplier, and one such tooling cost about €1,200. I was thinking ‘there has to be another way.’
Having been familiar with 3D printing from my education, I started looking and found the Form 2 3D printer after reading some reviews online. My colleagues understand the value in 3D printing now, but at the beginning, they were extremely skeptical. They thought 3D printing was more like a toy.
In our business, we expect that good equipment is inevitably also expensive. Most of our machinery starts at $100,000 and goes well beyond that. When my colleagues saw that the Form 2 only costs about $3,500, they asked me, “Why should we buy a toy?”
We ordered multiple custom sample parts to conduct tests, and it turned out that the 3D printed parts were capable. Holes and length tolerances were within the ±0.1 mm interval. I researched the material costs for my amortization calculation and discovered that a 3D printed set of the tooling for shot peening would only cost $45. I summarized this into a presentation for the board and took the parts to the kickoff meeting of the new gear plant. They were finally convinced, and we decided to buy our first Form 2, which we soon scaled up to three units.
In what cases has 3D printing helped trim production timelines and save costs?
Pankl was selected to manufacture entire gearbox assemblies for a well-known motorcycle manufacturer in 2016, and we swiftly began to set up the new production facility. Manufacturing these gears is an elaborate process. Forged steel parts go through multiple stages of machining using automatic lathes, followed by heat treatment and stress relief.
Each stage of turning in the automatic lathes requires custom jigs for every individual gear type. Machining these parts is costly, and adds significant complexity and risk to the manufacturing process.
Our schedule was tight because we had to produce many more gear types than expected. By the time we got to designing and ordering tooling, we were already supposed to start producing the first acceptance lots. We couldn’t just design the custom jigs and get them next day. If we had outsourced to traditional machining service providers, we would have had to wait six more weeks before we could start production–so we decided to produce the parts in-house on our Form 2 3D printers.
With 3D printing, you can simply take the same design, send it to the printer, and then have the finished part ready by the next morning. This leaves time to check the part on the manufacturing line and make any necessary changes. It also simplified the design process, providing the design freedom to produce jigs in any shape. In conventional CNC milling or turning, you are constrained by the need to design machinable parts, and every extra curve, hole, or chamfer adds complexity to the process.
Using a single Form 2, we can print a single jig in 5—9.5 hours, and running all three of our machines enables us to produce about 40 jigs within a week.
A simple machined jig costs about $40—50, but more complex parts can cost up to $300. 3D printing reduces these direct costs to $8.5—25, and significantly lowers overhead costs in design, purchasing, and storage, resulting in more than 90 percent overall cost reduction. Considering we’ll have to produce more than 1,000 jigs over the course of production, 3D printing will help the company save more than $150,000.
How did these parts fare on the production line?
We’ve had lots of problems in the past because the cooling media in the lathe is very aggressive on plastic parts, and makes them brittle after some time. Parts 3D printed with Tough Resin have shown resistance against our cooling media, and they are strong enough to withstand the intermittent load that these parts have to endure. Holes and length tolerances normally lie within the ±0.1 mm interval, which satisfies the requirements for our jigs.
We’ve already produced more than 300 3D printed jigs to manufacture small batches of 200 parts of each gear for the trial production run. Soon, we’ll scale up production to 1,000-2,000 parts per batch and the production capacity of the facility will increase to more than 1.5 million gears per year.
What are some other applications where you have used 3D printing?
Prototyping, shot peening, masking, and manufacturing various jigs and tooling. For example, when we have a new connecting rod design, we 3D print prototypes to discuss complex features on the part. It’s much easier if you can look at the part, and hold it in your hands.
Once we had to design a custom connecting rod for a customer, who wanted to verify if it’d fit into the building room of a cylinder and that it wouldn’t hit the chamber or the cylinder head itself while turning. We 3D printed a prototype and sent it to them. Once they confirmed that the design worked, we could start production with confidence. The alternative would have been to produce a machined part, which would have been more expensive for the customer and required eight weeks of waiting time.
We also 3D printed special adapters for grippers on an automated handling system. To achieve the perfect grip between the gripper and the part, you have to take the negative of the part, and form the fingers of the gripper according to the shape of your part. Normally we would have milled or cast it, which would have been substantially more expensive.
Recently, we used Flexible Resin in a shot peening machine to increase the friction between the self-cleaning jigs and some other parts. The friction between the metal parts was too low to transfer the turning movement. I added some 3D printed elastic brakes in the tooling to increase the friction so that the turning movement was transmitted from the bottom to the top. Getting these parts from an external vendor would have taken weeks.
Do you have any other plans to use 3D printing within Pankl?
One of my goals is to get more orders from other divisions within Pankl. We’ve had success with 3D printed parts in our production line, and I see countless other applications that could benefit from 3D printing. I want to show other engineers the parts we make, and the applications where we use them, to make them aware that this technology is available to them in-house.
I started with this project when other colleagues showed interest in our new processes. I sent around information on the 3D printing materials, such as their mechanical properties, what they look like, and the particular use cases they’re suitable for. I also printed sample parts for other departments, described the design specifications and how they can order something.
SEE WHAT YOU CAN CREATE WITH A FORM 2
Explore the materials to discover the one that fits your needs.
Request a Free Sample
We’ve already printed parts for aerospace and drivetrain divisions. They send us the designs, we produce the parts for them, and they receive finished parts that are ready to use in their machines. Pankl is a large company, though, which makes this a slow process. We have to overcome the same hurdles as we did initially within our department, and I believe many other companies have these concerns about 3D printing.. But looking at the results we’ve achieved, I’m positive that they’ll recognize the value in the technology.
We’re excited to announce two new additions to the Formlabs SLA printer hardware family. Formlabs is completing the Form 2 SLA workflow with the Form Wash and the Form Cure. These affordable additions to your print finishing area will simplify the isopropyl wash process and ensure consistent part curing. So, what are the Form Wash and Form Cure? I’m glad you asked. Below you’ll see an overview. They are expected to ship fall of ’17.
Formlabs Form Wash and Form Cure
The Form Wash and Form Cure are built to complete the stereolithography (SLA) engine and streamline your 3D printing process to product better results with less time and effort.
Here’s the skinny…
Form Wash Automated Cleaning
- Consistently Clean: Form Wash’s rotating impeller agitates isopropyl alcohol (IPA) around every nook and cranny of your parts, getting them perfectly clean–every time.
- Built to Fit the Build Platform: Parts travel straight from the Form 2 to Form Wash; they can stay right on the build platform or be placed in the basket.
- Automated Wash Cycle: Manual washing requires careful attention, as parts left too long in IPA can become warped/deformed. Form Wash automatically raises parts out of IPA when wash time is up. Parts air dry and are ready when you are.
- IPA Calibration: Form Wash can hold up to 8.6 L liters of IPA, enough to wash approximately 70 prints. The hydrometer lets you know when it’s time to change out IPA. A siphon makes it easy to transfer IPA in and out of the wash bucket.
Maximum Mechanical Properties with Form Cure
- Advanced Heating: Precise heat control is the key to successful post-curing. Form Cure’s chamber is able to achieve temperatures of up to 80 C.
- Balanced UV Light: 13 LEDs use 405 nm Light to trigger the post-curing reaction, working with the heater to post-cure parts.
- Uniform Exposure: A rotating turntable, heat flow, and dispersed lights provide uniform exposure during post-curing.
- An Intuitive Interface: It’s easy to set Form Cure’s temperature and post-cure time. For Standard Resins, simply use the default. For all other materials, use recommended settings for optimum performance.
We are now accepting preorders for both the Form Wash and Form Cure. They are projected to begin shipping this fall. Complete our pre-order form and we’ll get in touch with you to make sure you are in the delivery queue when they start to roll off the dock.
Learn more about the Form 2 SLA 3D desktop printer or request a free sample to see the quality of prints.
Our friends at Formlabs recently announced their newest dental resins to add a range of new capabilities to Formlabs printers, including crown and bridge models, splints, retainers, and soon dentures.
If you walk into a dental lab or clinic today, and you’ll find a completely different set of tools than you would have just few years ago. Dentistry is well on its way to fully embracing digital workflows, replacing messy alginate impressions with digital scans and complicated manual techniques with computer-aided manufacturing.
This should come as no surprise. Every set of teeth is unique, meaning that every dental appliance has to be custom-made. The need for mass customization, and the small size of the final products, makes this a perfect application for 3D printing. While material properties were a barrier to broader application of this technology, new biocompatible materials are enabling dentists to 3D print a growing range of products.
To date, Formlabs dental users have completed over 150,000 prints. Today, with the launch of two new Dental Resins, Formlabs is greatly expanding the range of dental products that the Form 2 can produce. With prints every bit as accurate as larger machines that cost $75,000 or more, the Form 2 is increasingly the go-to 3D printer for the dental professionals.
Use Case
Matt Roberts, CDT, talks about his experience running 4 Form 2 3D printers for various applications in his dental lab here: The Future of Dental 3D Printing, with Matt Roberts from CMR Dental Lab.
Meet the New Resins
Dental Model Resin
Dental Model Resin is designed for crown and bridge models with removable dies, it is a high precision, high accuracy resin. It prints crisp margins and contacts within ± 35 microns and removable dies with a consistently tight fit. It has a smooth, matte surface finish and color similar to gypsum make it easy to switch from analog to digital model production.
Dental LT Clear Resin
A Class IIa biocompatible resin, Dental LT Clear’s high resistance to fracture and wear make it ideal for splints, retainers, and other direct-printed orthodontic devices. This clear material polishes to high optical transparency for beautiful final products.
3D Printed Dentures
We’re pushing the boundaries of digital dentistry and developing the first integrated, end-to-end workflow for manufacturing high-quality 3D printed dentures. Clinical studies and workflow tests are currently in development at Formlabs and partner dental labs, with the new biocompatible Denture Base and Teeth Resins coming in fall 2017.
3D printing is not only transforming the way organizations manufacture products, it’s transforming the manufacturing process. Before introducing 3D printing to your organization, it’s important to understand these how your organization plans to address these questions:
- How will 3D printing improve your organizations product offering?
- How will 3D printing improve your organizations processes?
- How can you implement 3D printing?
How will 3D printing improve your organizations product offering?
Your organization needs to understand how 3D printing will provide a competitive advantage to their products. 3D printing allows for limitless customization and efficient production. You 
