The Ultimate Resin Toolkit & Removal Technique

We’ve been printing with Formlabs machines for many years now - starting from the Form 2, and now to the Form 3, Form 3B and Form 3L. These machines have been an integral part of our business and have allowed us to help hundreds of customers with their product development.

Knowing this, it’s no surprise that we have developed very specific processes internally in order to keep a tidy, clean and efficient workspace. In this post I want to share how we’ve been effortlessly removing parts from build plates. This is based on years of experience across every possible resin type, over thousands and thousands of parts.

The Right Tools

Having the right tools is always important. Equally important is knowing how to use these tools. We’ll show our technique for using these below.

Note that while you can use the flex build plate, it’s somewhat of a pain to clean if you swap resins all the time like we do.

Also, there are some scenarios where the flex plate doesn’t work and tools are necessary.

The above tools are a high quality side cutter from Hakko (made in Italy) and a special Japanese non-stick scraper (made and imported from Japan). The latter is actually a tool that Formlabs supplies with their Form 3L systems, but as far as I know it’s not a tool you can purchase separately unless you specially import them from Japan yourself.

The secret trick is to use the side cutter to snip and release rafts gently, and then use the scraper to get under the part. Snipping is the most critical step. Without doing this, it’s often difficult to get the scraper under the raft. However, once an edge is snipped and released, part removal becomes trivial. Furthermore, with both tools you can reliably release and remove parts into their wash stations without ever having to get resin on your gloves - an important requirement for keeping your workspace clean.

Snip & Scrape

The secret technique that allows us to remove parts effortlessly while keeping things clean and safe.

If you want to see some more in depth instructions or purchase these tools (yes we’ve imported a bunch of scrapers directly from Japan) - check our our product page or watch the videos below.