Printers

We have two models of printers from Formlabs at EPIC. The Form2 printer is an SLA printer, which stands for Stereolithography. The Form3 is a LFSLA, which stands for Low Force Stereolithography. These printers use a photopolymer resin tank and a movable laser to cure each layer. The layer height ranges from 0.025mm to 0.30mm and the selection available will vary with the type of resin you are printing with. For most prints 0.1mm layer height is a good balance between surface smoothness and print time so this is our default for prints. For a quicker print choose a larger layer height – the 0.16mm layer height is available on Grey resin. For further details on each resin available from Formlabs please visit their Resin Selector website. The resins we currently stock are listed in the table above. If you wish to use a resin which we do not stock please contact us, you may have the option to purchase the resin and resin tank and provide them to EPIC to complete your print requests.

After printing is complete the SLA parts go into a solvent bath to remove excess uncured liquid resin and then undergo a secondary UV light and heat cure process to reach their final material strength. Parts will continue to cure if exposed to UV light so a UV protectant coating is recommended for parts used as functional products. Due to the printing method resin printers always produce solid parts. This means the parts are water-tight, however they may absorb chemical solvents or interact chemically with castable resins. These parts typically require a support lattice in order to print successfully and remove from the build platform without failure. The support lattice may either be removed using wire snips or snapping them off by hand, depending on the resin. The material properties for the resins in stock at EPIC range from a soft flexible material to a rigid glass infused material. Formlabs provides ‘white papers’ on each material, including their material properties, on their website.

For resin prints please pay attention to the design constraints outlined by Formlabs in their Design Specs blog and Tolerance Guide (PDF). We will generally contact you regarding a print request if regions of your part seem too thin to print or holes seem too small. We cannot always tell if the resin will wash out of openings completely before they go into the post cure process. Form2 printers apply more force to the part as it is printing so these are restricted to parts under 100mL and 1cm wall thickness. Form3 printers can print larger parts and handle up to 350mL volume depending on the geometry. If your part is too large for SLA, and cannot be traditionally fabricated, then FDM is a good option. If you are looking for transparent parts, Form3 will be a better option than Form2 but will still require polishing for truly clear parts. Failures in resin parts usually occur when parts are too thin, when the tank ages, when parts are not supported well enough so they tear and stick to the bottom of the tank, or when parts warp during curing.

Queue Speed:

• We have 6 Form3 printers (our Form2 printers are semi-retired and reserved for ceramic prints only).
• If you request a lot of parts in one resin please keep in mind we typically have one printer per resin type so you will not be able to utilize all of the printers at once even if they happen to be available.
• Once a place in the queue is available most parts will take a day to print and if they are a small layer height (0.05mm, 0.025mm) they may take more than a day to print.
• Queue priority will be given based on our Policies and Prioritization page.

We have 7 Bambu Lab printers at EPIC reserved for print requests through our web portal. These printers use a heated bed and enclosure and have a material management system which will load a new spool of material when the filament runs out (if the same filament is loaded in the other bay(s)). We use the Engineering bed which is a flexible spring steel with a PEI powder coating. Bambu Lab makes their own slicer which may be used to prepare the parts for printing. When setting up the parts for printing the correct printer model, nozzle size and filament in the material management system must be selected. The slicer allows you to input custom settings for layer height, infill percentage, speed, temperature, etc. Our P1S printers use 0.4mm steel nozzles and are setup with PLA or TPU filaments. The X1C printer is designed for the composites which wear down the printer components more quickly. Our X1C is setup with a 0.6mm hardened steel nozzle for printing CF filled filaments, when those are not installed its typically printing PETG. The Bambu Lab printers are best used for quick draft prints, decorative prints, very thin parts, parts designed to print without support or raft, very small holes from the print bed up. Parts can hold water if they are printed with 0.2mm layer height or smaller. These printers are much faster than the previous class of FFF printers so we are utilizing a larger nozzle on the X1C to prevent frequent clogs with trickier filaments rather than to speed up printing time. PLA is significantly cheaper than the other printing materials so larger parts will be a more reasonable cost – as a result we often use these for personal print requests and large molds. The Bambu Lab printers do offer the option of water dissolvable support with PLA but we use PLA as the default support material because the dissolvable support requires a lot of material changes so that drastically increases the print time. Multi color prints are also possible, but changing filament back and forth adds significant print time and material usage. While the technology is improving these printers can still fail due to bed adhesion, parts warping from heat, nozzle clogs, filament binding up on the spool, parts printed without sufficient support, among other reasons.

We also have 6 Bambu Lab X1C printers available in our First-In Cart for self-guided printing. Visit our page on the First-In cart for more information on using these printers.

We have 3 FDM printers from Stratasys; 1 Uprint, 1 F370 and 1 F370CR. The Uprint prints in Ivory ABS and the F370 and F370CR have more material options and a larger build envelope. The F370 printers have a material management system which will load a new spool of material when the filament runs out (if the same filament is loaded in bay 2). The material we have in stock is listed in the table above. All of the Stratasys prints will have dissolvable support except for the PLA on the F370 which will have snap off support. The PLA is preferred for large parts to keep costs down – but full bed parts can have bed adhesion issues. The TPU material is a flexible option available on the F370 only, this plastic will be soft at thin cross-sections similar to a hard rubber. A chemical bath is used to remove the support from the parts so they will require additional processing time post printing but will not require manual support removal. Failures in these printers can happen if the printer breaks down, nozzle clogs, the build tray is too worn, the auto orientation isn’t ideal, or the part is tall and thin and printed without stabilizers.