At 9:42 on a Tuesday morning last January, our lead engineer forwarded me a link with a one-line message. I opened it to find the Formlabs Form 3+ SLA 3D printer package, along with a short note.
“Can we get one of these?”
I should explain my role before we go further. I’m the office administrator for a 64-person automotive engineering company. I manage purchasing and facilities — roughly $210,000 a year across 14 vendors. I report to both operations and finance, so every purchase gets scrutinized from two directions. If it isn’t metal, cutting fluid, or tooling, it comes through my desk. I order Capto 6 tool holders when the CNC department needs new couplings for the lathes. I know more than I ever wanted to about PPE suppliers and solvent disposal.
A 3D printer was outside my lane. But the request was reasonable, and Marcus doesn’t ask for much. So I did what I do with every purchase: I researched.
Why I Spent Two Weeks Reading About Formlabs
The name that surfaced in almost every serious discussion was Formlabs. I read the Formlabs 3D printer company overview first, because I wanted to know who I’d be handing money to. Formlabs was founded in 2011 by three MIT Media Lab alumni, launched the original Form 1 on Kickstarter in 2012, and has since grown into one of the larger names in professional desktop printing — SLA printers, the Fuse 1 SLS system, a dental division, and a broad resin catalog (Source: formlabs.com/about).
That history mattered to me as a buyer. A vendor that has been around for more than a decade and relies on institutional customers is less likely to vanish mid-contract.
The reviews pointed me to the Form 3+. According to Formlabs’ product documentation, it uses Low Force Stereolithography (LFS), a gentler peeling mechanism designed to make prints more reliable than older SLA technology. I’m not qualified to argue the mechanics. What came across consistently in forums and engineer groups was that it works, the materials are good, and the company stands behind it.
I went with the Complete Package: the printer, the Form Wash, the Form Cure, and a starter cartridge of Grey Pro Resin. We paid about $4,800 in March 2024 (verify current pricing; Formlabs changes bundle offers). Finance approved it faster than I expected.
What sold me on the package was the integration. The Form Wash and Form Cure talk to the printer’s timing and resin recipes, which removes guesswork. I’d rather pay for components that work together than assemble something from mismatched lab equipment.
Looking back, that approval was the easy part. I had no real picture of what running the machine would involve.
The First Week: Printing Is the Easy Part
Setup took about an hour. I’m not an engineer, and I had the printer running the same afternoon.
The first test print — a small rook with pivoting segments — came off the build plate clean and fully free. I remember thinking: this is going to be fine. Why does anyone complain about 3D printing?
Week two corrected that assumption.
The part nobody warns you about is the cleaning. Everyone asks how to clean 3D printer resin, and the short answer is isopropyl alcohol. The long answer is a process: dunk the print in IPA, swish, inspect, dunk again, then cure it in the Form Cure for the time on the resin datasheet. Every step creates contaminated waste — gloves, paper towels, dirty IPA that needs proper disposal. It isn’t complicated. It’s the constant, low-level mess that marketing photos leave out.
In my first week, I made the classic beginner error. I hit print on a part with long unsupported spans and never considered that resin pools inside the geometry. The print warped off the plate, the base layers delaminated, and a quarter of a resin cartridge cured into a squishy mess. The machine worked perfectly. I simply didn’t understand orientation, supports, and drain holes — the actual skills of SLA printing.
(Should mention: I also touched a washed print with a bare hand once, assuming it was safe. The skin irritation the next day made the warnings click. Nitrile gloves are non-negotiable.)
Support removal was another skill I underestimated. The small contact points hold the part firmly, and pulling them off takes patience. On a complex part, I’d spend 20 minutes with a flush cutter and a scraper, then another 10 sanding the little bumps that remain. Not hard. Just honest work that belongs in the time budget.
For the first month, printing consumed maybe 30 percent of the time and cleaning, curing, and finishing took the rest. Once I accepted that split, the machine stopped frustrating me.
The Moment It Earned Its Space on the Floor
By month three, I was still privately wondering where the return on investment would show up. Then we got the rush contract.
A customer sent us a housing that had to be leak-tested at a precise angle before shipment. Our metal fixture was out of tolerance, and a replacement from the tooling supplier came with a $3,700 quote and a three-week lead time. The contract had a late-delivery penalty. Waiting would have eaten most of the margin.
Marcus modeled a locating fixture in about four hours. We printed it overnight in Grey Pro Resin. It was compact enough for the Form 3+’s 14.5 by 14.5 by 17.5 cm build volume, and it held the housing at the required angle under test pressure. It flexed a little. It didn’t fail. It ran for eight weeks until the permanent steel fixture arrived.
The resin cost roughly $70. The delivery penalty we avoided was four figures.
That one job changed how the shop viewed the machine. It also reframed the purchase for me. The 3D printer wasn’t competing with the CNC department; it was absorbing all the one-off work that CNC was never efficient at.
The contrast became vivid a few weeks later when I ordered another batch of Capto 6 tool holders for the lathe cells. A single Capto 6 tool holder runs $450 to $700. It’s precision-ground steel, designed to hold a cutting head rigidly while it chews through metal parts, and we replace them as contract geometries change. I’ve ordered them for years without thinking. They’re the right tool for production.
But the printer fills the gap at the other end. Instead of a $600 steel tool that does one specific job, we now have a $4,800 machine that makes custom, short-lived shop tools for whatever walks in the door. The two systems complement each other.
This, in my view, is how additive manufacturing in the automobile industry actually plays out on a shop floor. According to Wohlers Report 2024, the global additive manufacturing market reached roughly $20 billion in 2023. But at our scale, none of those dollars come from production parts. The value is in jigs, fixtures, gauges, check-fit samples, and finding out a design is wrong for $50 instead of $5,000.
What I’d Tell Another Buyer
If you’re the person whose inbox receives the “can we get one of these?” email, here’s the honest version.
The sticker price is the minor expense. Engineering resins ran about $159 per liter when we ordered, and we use roughly a liter every two weeks. Then there’s isopropyl alcohol, gloves, paper towels, cleaning fluid, and eventually replacement resin tanks and build plates. In the first nine months, we spent about $3,100 on consumables on top of the $4,800 package. That’s normal, not exceptional.
The workflow is the discipline. The machine itself is genuinely set-and-forget. But someone has to design the part, slice it correctly, orient it, add supports, remove supports, clean it, cure it, and finish it. On our floor, that someone is an engineer, and their time has a cost. The printer doesn’t remove labor. It relocates it.
That said, every shop is different. We run one printer and a small prototyping workload. If your team pushes 40 prints a week, your consumables and labor math will look completely different from ours. Scale the numbers to your situation.
Know what the tool is for. I recommend the Formlabs Form 3+ to any engineering or manufacturing operation that prototypes; it has been excellent for ours. But if you’re evaluating it for end-use production parts, it’s the wrong tool. SLA resin parts are more brittle than injection-molded parts, they creep under sustained load, and layer lines create weak points you can’t see until failure. The honest framing: this machine exists to help you learn how something should be made, not to mass-produce it.
It took me nine months and roughly 200 printed parts to understand that. The first months were excitement and mess. The middle was skepticism. Around the leak-test fixture, I settled into the truth. The Form 3+ didn’t become the most impressive machine in our shop. It became the most available one. Our engineers no longer ask whether they can make a jig or a gauge. They model it, print it, and recapture hours that used to be lost waiting on suppliers.
That’s the real product. The printer is just the part you put on the PO.