Hello everyone, just got my Voron serial and onto the next project… Building a 38"x38" MPCNC in Formlabs Tough Resin for fun and out of curiosity to see how the parts perform and hold up over time. Here’s the progress so far.
Wow that’s good looking! How much would that much resin cost?
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Counting a few failed builds, I think I used about 6 liters total. The resin goes for $175/liter. Luckily, I have some access to this stuff and don’t need to pay for it 
Oof I figured it would be up there! Still looks great, and hopefully not too brittle (I think that’s the other downside of resin?).
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Mass, do you work at Formlabs? Or are you just friends with someone who does? My friend is an application engineer there and I’m always jealous he gets free printers and free resin. LOL
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Yup, joined the company about 8 weeks ago
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Nice! Like the clear look to it. Would take me forever to print it on my Prism. The Siraya resin isn’t quite as expensive, would still be a couple hundred in resin though.
What’s your layer height?
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The parts were printed across 4 different Form 2’s and a Form 3, over 200 hours of accumulated print time. All parts were printed at 100micron layer height, the largest available layer height setting for Tough resin.
Typical standard modeling resins tend to be pretty brittle, yes. Formlabs Tough is one of our specially formulated engineering resins. It has many similar qualities to ABS.
https://support.formlabs.com/s/article/Using-Tough-Resin?language=en_US
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Although that looks amazing the specs say it is not recommended for rigid parts and it has a much bigger elongation than ABS.
And even this is the reason we tend to use PLA I think.
But I’m very curious to see how it will work once you finished building your MPCNC.
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Yeah, the properties are similar, but not the same as ABS. Fully aware it’s not the ideal material for this application and don’t expect it to last forever.
Making it for fun in the name of science and out of curiosity to test the limits of the material because I have unlimited access. My expertise is with the biocompatible resins and dental applications, just having fun messing around with the engineering resins. Ill definitely be posting updates as more progress is completed.
Oh that is begging for some tiny leds to light up the parts. Super cool experiment, I would love to give it a wiggle to see how it feels. Shoot just build it small and it will be fine! 8"x8"x2" work area, maybe 10"x10" even.
Congrats on a cool new job!
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I believe the reason this is the case is because Ryan has not tested it and he doesn’t want someone to waste hundreds of dollars on resin. I can say from experience, the tough resin is a lot different from the typical photosensitive modeling resins that are common on the market for printers like the Moai, Anycubic photon, etc. It is more comparable to an engineering resin like Siraya Blu.
pyuri, how did you print them? are they solid? do they roll well on the tube or is there a lot of tension?
Damn, you’re right. I’m definitely doing that! It feels SOLID and the tolerances are on point! That said, the material does slowly creep over time and I expect those corner mounts to be the first to go. If you’re ever in the MA/NH area, feel free to come check it out. Otherwise, I’d be more than happy to print you parts in any FL resins for R&D, experiments, or just for shits.
Thank you!
Awesome thanks. Lets see how that works first.
The corners see such a tiny load I don’t see how they could go bad. You don’t need to tighten the screws very much at all, no need to stop the tubes from rotating even, most of mine only have 2 out of 4 screws in them. That is also why I can’t believe there are so many big giant corners, of all the parts I am the least worried about them.
Yeah, I agree it’s not worth it to spend $1000 printing these parts just to watch how they break down. Luckily, I didn’t! My interest here is learning about the limits of the Tough material (and eventually all the other resins) while learning & building this amazing machine and sharing my journey along the way. I included a link with more information on Formlabs Tough material above. It’s one of the specially formulated engineering resins designed to simulate widely used prototyping/production materials.
Yes, they were printed solid. Resin prints are generally not sliced with infill. Close to 6 liters of resin and over 200 hours total printing time. The tolerances and offsets are SPOT ON. The parts roll very smoothly. I will post some videos of movement after our next build session.
That’s good to know. I shared the project with some users on the Voron forum and someone said they expected those corner mounts to go bad first. I thought it made sense, but I’m glad I mentioned it now. So, what parts do take the most wear?