HackadayStop Ironing 3D Prints
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://hackaday.com/2026/02/25/stop-ironing-3d-prints/
Stop Ironing 3D Prints https://hackaday.com/2026/02/25/stop-ironing-3d-prints/
#3dPrinterhacks #3dprinting #Ironing #Printsmoothing
#3dPrinterhacks #3dprinting #Ironing #Printsmoothing
Non-planar Ironing Makes Smooth Prints https://hackaday.com/2024/09/15/non-planar-ironing-makes-smooth-prints/ #non-planar3Dprinting #3dPrinterhacks #printsmoothing
hackaday unofficial3D Print Finishing By Spraying Glazing Putty
Finishing off 3D prints is a labour-intensive process, and getting a good looking, smooth surface suitable for painting takes a lot of time and plenty of practice. Deeper printing layer lines or minor surface defects can be smoother over with a variety of materials, from putties to resins, but the deeper the defect, the thicker the filler and that takes it toll on the surface details - smoothing those out and making fine details less distinct. [Darkwing dad] has another solution that looks pretty easy to achieve, by mixing acetone with glazing putty it can be airbrushed over the print surface in one go. After a little experimentation with the ratio of putty to acetone, a wide open nozzle and a low pressure, it was found that a nice even spray could be achieved. Importantly it dries in just a few minutes, enabling multiple coats to be applied in a short space of time.
Once sufficient thickness has been applied, the coating can easily sanded to get a smooth result with the worst of the gaps filled, and the layer lines nicely hidden. The final part of the filling process is more typical, with a few coats of filler primer applied straight from a rattle can, followed by a light sand and you're good for painting.
We've covered smoothing 3D prints practically as long as we've been covering 3D printing itself, and there are multiple ways to do this, depending on the filament material, your budget and you tolerance for noxious fumes. Here's a guide for smoothing using UV curable resins, using a special smoothable filament with IPA, and finally if this is just too fancy, smelly or expensive, just whip out the old butane torch and smooth those prints with good old fashioned fire.
Thanks [Zane] for the tip!
There was a time when most 3D printers used ABS, which while it is a great plastic for toughness, is hard to print with since it tends to warp. Worse still, it stinks and the fumes may be bad for you so most people don't print much ABS anymore. One thing you might miss though, is how you can smooth ABS with acetone vapor. A smoothed print doesn't show layer lines and looks more like plastic part that didn't go through a nozzle. PLA and most other plastics people usually print with now don't smooth with PLA. [Major Hardware] likes the look of that, but doesn't like working with ABS and acetone fumes, so he's started using Polysmooth, and you can see the results in the video below.
The results look good, but be warned that the filament is relatively pricey and is for use with a $300 machine that atomizes your alcohol into a mist. We feel certain you could do the same thing for less since it appears to just be like a humidifier, but we'd also suggest being careful putting flammable substances in a consumer-grade humidifier and certainly don't use a vaporizer.
The filament sounds like it is on par with PLA for ease of printing. The material has a higher glass temperature than PLA but less than ABS. The tensile strength and Young's modulus (a measure of stiffness) numbers are comparable to ABS. Although all smoothing has some imperfections and you probably need to experiment with times and other parameters. The smoothing did fuse some movable joints, so anything that moves or fits together is probably a bad candidate for this process. We've also heard that thin-walled parts can get soft in water due to alcohol residue, but you can dry or soak the part clean to avoid that.
If you want to try your own hand at making a mist, this might get you started. After all, if it can handle acetone, we imagine alcohol isn't any worse. While it isn't as easy to handle as alcohol, we hear the solvents THF or ethyl acetate can smooth regular PLA. Heat guns and open flames are popular, too.
#3dprinterhacks #3dprinting #layerlines #polysmooth #printsmoothing
Give 3D Printed Plastic a Well-Worn Metal Look
Affordable 3D printers let us turn ideas into physical reality without a big expensive workshop, but with their power came some disadvantages. The nature of FDM printers impart layer lines and nozzle ridges in the parts they produce. They can be minimized with optimized print settings, but never eliminated. [Emily Velasco] loves the power of 3D printing but not how the parts look. So she put in the effort to make 3D-printed plastic look like distressed metal and showed us how she did it. (Video also embedded after the break.)
This video is a follow-up to her Pet Eye project in response to feedback on Twitter. She had mentioned that the salvaged metal box for Pet Eye wasn't quite big enough to hold everything, so she had to extend its internal volume with a 3D print box on the back. It fit in so well that the offhand comment surprised many people who wanted to know more about how it was done. So she designed a demonstration cube covered with mechanical characteristics, and gave us this walkthrough of its transformation.
Similar techniques can be found in other fields like fine scale modeling. But historically those fields did not have to deal with the challenge posed by layer lines and ridges of 3D printed plastic. In any case we love seeing this cross-pollination: just as 3D printed parts are used to customize fine scale models, we can incorporate well-aged metal finishing techniques to 3D printed parts. It's another tool in our box for 3D print finishing alongside tools like heat and even salt.
#3dprinterhacks #3dprinted #howto #postprocessing #printfinishing #printsmoothing #sanding #smoothingparts
