Did anyone else see the new 3D printer from Formlabs?

It’s a “desktop” SLS for $10K, not too shabby!! And the cool thing about SLS is that you don’t need supports.

Presenting the Fuse 1.

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One of my friends works there so I keep eyeing his awesome toys and wondering when the price will come down low enough to justify buying one of my own. :smiley:

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no, but i definitely want one someday. expensive, but it just means it isn’t for me; i know this is a big step. i imagine prototypers will be over the moon, though.

some of the designs they show off in the gif are ridiculously cool.

Yeah, that was a cool announcement. didn’t quite understand the cell thing (unlike a lot of other companies cells like Carbon’s) there didn’t seem a lot of automation, mostly just monitoring and queuing. Basically Octoprint for Form2s…

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I can’t wait for the day when there is a SLS printer I can buy for the same price as a middle of the road FDM printer. I want something like this so badly but 10k is way out of my price range

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I follow Formlabs on twitter so my phone was positively exploding yesterday from the updates lol. I sure would love to have a reason for needing one, it looks amazing!

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i think it’s just that the medium is loaded into the cartridge, and removing prints may be messy with powder everywhere. this way if you want to maximize uptime you can prep a cartridge and just swap it when the other one is done. given that it’s still quite slow, that might be important for a small business to have.

you and me both, brother. if i ever move to halifax, maybe we can splitsies :smiley:

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Don’t friggin tempt me.

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haha don’t worry, i’m stuck in london for the foreseeable future. i’m vaguely obsessed with the concept of regaining the neighborhood bond, though

Wow that’s a huge step in driving down the cost. Whoever coined the term “Race to the bottom” was right. :slight_smile:

The support structures are my single biggest headache in SLA printing though. When they pop loose or fail, the whole thing turns into a hardened puddle of goop.

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That is pretty interesting. We have a SLS machine at work. There is alot of support equipment that goes along with it in addition to the the SLS machine. Plus it is quite messy with all the powder. We keep it in it’s own room for air conditioning,contain the dust, and keep the powder at the right humidity levels.
The parts come out in a large powder cake. You basically dig through the cake and pull out your parts. Kind of like an archaeological dig. Then the parts are cleaned off with stiff brushes and dental tools. Once most of the powder is removed, we put the parts in a small sand blaster and finish cleaning them.
The excess powder is sifted, sorted, and some of it is reclaimed and some is discarded.
We find the best practice for SLS is to load up the full volume of build envelope with a many parts as you can cram in there. There is software to help nest in 3D. So we tend to run in mini batches. The powder is the expensive part so you don’t want to waste it.
Part quality is very nice. You get a .004" texture. I would call it pebbly, but it is smaller than that. There is some grain to the layers but not near as bad as a 3D printer.
I am definitely going to watch this machine.

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Good Tested exploration of the product. Reserve now? Wonder how shipping schedule will work with them?

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Watching the Tested video, looks like Form1 has addressed some of the issues with containing the SLS powder and minimizing mess with a post-finishing/powder collection system, and system that reloads powder into cartridges to keep mess down.

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Yes that was sweet but $20,000 is out of my price range. I bet this is very successful if it works as advertised.

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This video gets into some more detail about SLS. Sounds like it truly isn’t a “home gamer” technology.

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One of my friends works at Formlabs. He’s really excited about their SLS products, but they’re probably not for most casual home users.

The material costs are super high, especially if you can’t fill the machine with parts every run.