Stratasys unveils its new SLA 3D printer, the V650 Flex and its F120 industrial FDM machine

AMUG 2019 (Additive Manufacturing Users Group) opened its doors in Chicago yesterday and as expected, many additive manufacturing players have chosen this opportunity to present their new products to the industry. As a matter of fact, the giant Stratasys unveiled its two new 3D printing solutions at the conference. Their F120 industrial FDM 3D printer is a compact machine designed for engineers, designers and educators. They also revealed their first SLA machine, the V650 Flex, positioning the manufacturer into a new market segment.

Last year, the Israeli manufacturer had discussed the possible development of a metal additive manufacturing platform to add a new technology to its already well-recognised range on the market. Currently, it is one of the three largest sellers of 3D printing solutions in the world. However, instead of venturing into metal additive manufacturing, it has turned to stereolithography. This is a process that the company has already been using for several years through its printing department, Stratasys Direct Manufacturing, but has decided to market today.

Stratasys Direct Manufacturing has been using SLA technology for some time now

V650 Flex, the SLA 3D Printer from Stratasys

“Visually, it is not a pretty machine. But it is a great machine because it maximises build volume”, explained one of the team members at Stratasys. It is indeed a fairly large and open machine that offers a very generous build volume of 508 x 508 x 584 mm and interchangeable resin trays. On the materials side, a partnership was signed with DSM to design Somos resins – at the moment 4 resins have been developed and tested. Stratasys has supposedly printed more than 150,000 parts (75,000 hours of printing) with the V650 Flex.