Most of the objects I have printed so far have served some sort of practical purpose–tools, modifications, or upgrades. I’ve printed a few smaller, “fun” objects for calibration, but nothing really to just keep on my desk and admire. This weekend I tinkered with some print settings and tried my hand at post-processing a few things. The results were very informative and gave me some ideas about what to try in the future.
The Fresh Prints
I found a pretty sweet bust of Gundam 00 Raiser on Thingiverse to use as my test object. I scaled it 50% of the original size. The creator said that support were not needed, but that didn’t work out in my case. I think the model would have printed fine at 100%, but I would definitely recommend supports for anything smaller. I guess I printed the “battle-damaged” version this time. This was printed at 0.1mm layer height at 60mm/s with some generic PLA. I definitely should have slowed it down a bit and checked my retraction settings again, but overall it worked out alright.
Fix it in Post
I removed the broken bits of plastic and then glued both halves together with epoxy. After the epoxy dried, I sanded the model with various grits of sandpaper, from 100 to 220. It was almost impossible to sand the smaller features and angled pieces by hand, which shows in the final iteration. After sanding I sprayed it with some Rustoleum spray primer. I tried to find their filler primer (as it was highly recommended for this type of project) but I couldn’t find any in my area. I may order some for the next time. Filler primer is usually used for 3D prints as it helps hide layer lines and other imperfections. Sanding fixes a lot of that too.
Results
Apologies for the overwhelming HDR bloom in these shots–I wanted to show the detail and texture of the final prints but that made the background weird. Overall, I think it worked out pretty well for my first attempt. Sanding and priming definitely helped improve the appearance of the print. I probably won’t paint this one as it was just an experiment to see how smooth I could get it by hand.
You can see how the larger areas turned out much better than the smaller details–they were much easier to reach and sand. Again, this is an area that would have been improved had I printed the object at 100%.
In conclusion, sanding and priming definitely work as a quick way to improve your prints, but it helps if the objects are simple and/or larger.
Next time I want to try coating the print in some sort of epoxy (like Smooth-On’s XTC-3D) to see how that compares.
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