When you helped launch Form 1 production on Kickstarter, we had planned on launching with a grey resin. At this point, however, grey requires further development to reach the material qualities we think you deserve.
Fortunately, after a year of development and literally hundreds of formula iterations, our materials team has come up with another resin so good, that we just have to get it to you first. We are proud to announce our flagship print material: Clear Resin!
In recent months, Clear has dramatically improved for excellent tensile, impact, and green strength, which allow for immediate use after printing. At 15 cents per cubic centimeter, it's affordable and fantastic for a wide-range of applications – from highly-detailed and complex models to fully-functioning prototypes.
Clear is also an excellent color for your prints, especially when playing with lighting. We've even had beautiful success painting our prints, which expands the color spectrum as much as you need to. Clear Resin will be available in the Form Store for $149 per liter as our first printers begin shipping.
The process to create Clear (and other materials) is a delicate balance of countless variables that range from chemical to mechanical to computational to safety. Different resins, for example, require a range of laser power settings to properly activate the photoinitiators. Yet material formulas also interact differently with the Form 1 itself. Mark, our Research Scientist, constantly confronts the challenge of improving resin properties while ensuring there is no adverse effect on the hardware. Next, we must optimize software settings for each and every resin formulation. Finally, the print material must be as safe to handle as common household chemicals (download the MSDS here).
For those of you still hungry for Grey, we're working on overdrive to get it to you. You can purchase it in the Form Store when ready (or let us know if you'd like to be placed later in the Form 1 ship queue for when it's available). The great thing about materials development is that we can upgrade your Form 1 capabilities without changing your hardware.
The Form Team is excited and up to the challenge of developing the best form creating technology possible.
You might want to stay tuned for more exciting updates.
-The Form Team
Formlabs White Paper: Post-Curing Prints
We set out to study the post-cure process in detail in order to optimize final mechanical properties of printed parts. Download the white paper to learn more.