Friday, January 05, 2024
Sandpaper Alternatives For 3D Prints
Hackaday: A finished 3D print, especially plastic deposition types, often have imperfections in them from the process of laying down each layer of material and from the printer itself. For small batches or one-off parts, we might reach for a few pieces of sandpaper to smooth out these rough edges.
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I wish I’d found this article last spring when I was working on my mandalorian costume. I 3D printed that entire costume on a, frankly quite shitty 3d printer, and I spent over 20 hours just sanding everything down. I literally got carpal tunnel from how much sanding I was doing. In the end I embraced some of the smaller imperfections on the pieces that weren’t as visible but oh boy did I spend so much time sanding. I even used auto body filler for some of the worst parts of the prints but that didn’t save me much time. I’d heard of some of these methods before, such as the solvent dissolving the rough parts of the print but there were others I hadn’t heard of. Many of these methods focused on giving the print a thick and sleek outer coating by using Epoxy or Goop and then painting over that. I wonder how well that would work with pieces with many small details, such as minifigures for TTRPGs. Considering how much detail has to be preserved in pieces like that I doubt that something like this could work without losing some things.
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