Form 4 Build Platform Flex

Form 4 Build Platform Flex

After testing build platform 2 as an intern, I came back to flexible build platforms as a full-time test engineer at Formlabs. I worked on qualifying the flexible platform for the Form 3L, then moved over to own Build Platform Flex for the Form 4 as its technical owner, from EVT through mass production.

Flexible build platforms let customers pop parts off by flexing the surface, instead of prying them off with tools. When a platform fails, a print can let go partway through, or parts warp and come off out of shape, and the customer loses the print, the resin and the time.

Qualification

I owned validation for Build Platform Flex on the Form 4, building on the jigs and test methods from my build platform 2 internship. Print testing showed the original design’s in-house test print failure rate was too high, with parts letting go and warping. I drove design changes to the platform, proposed the acceptance criteria and tested each revision to them against the original, and ran a side study on part warping.

That failure rate only means something if the test prints look like what customers print, so I also checked that our in-house stress test prints were representative of real customer prints by querying print metrics.

Results

Through those design changes, we cut the in-house print failure rate on the platform by more than two-thirds and brought part warping to parity with Form 3 levels. Build Platform Flex shipped with the Form 4 in 2024.

Some technical details are left out for IP protection.