Hasta La Ideas

Resins for SLA 3D printers can be expensive, and specialist designers tend to buy resins tweaked with properties specific to their needs: Overall strength for engineering applications, high precision for dental or medical applications, excellent finish straight-out-of-the-printer for jewelry or presentation-model applications, et cetera.

But for the designer who may be working on a variety of project types, Formlabs reckons their excitingly-named Grey Resin is a good catch-all. The neutral grey tone is great for evaluating forms, the matte finish takes paint or other finishing processes well, and the resolutions it can support (from 160 down to 25 microns) can accurately produce small details.

Formlabs says Grey Resin requires minimal post-processing, coming out of the machine with a smooth matte surface “rivaling injection-molded plastics” without you needing to sand, polish or prime before painting or finishing. The overall strength is a little trickier to measure, as it will obviously depend on the specific geometry of your part, the print settings and orientation, the temperature etc., and they have a data sheet here with some figures you can throw at your engineer.

Grey Resin runs $149 a liter. To get you on the hook, Formlabs is offering to send you this free rotating arm part (below) printed in Grey Resin for you to evaluate, if you fill out this form.

And no, we’re not getting paid to run this, nor receiving resin kickbacks; this is simply what I came across in my daily search to find things that might interest a practicing industrial designer. If you’ve got experience with a competing resin you recommend, please feel free to share it in the comments.