Flexible PLA!? - 3D Printing & Painting FLEXIBLE Cosplay Armor!

hey you guys want to see something cool which one of these 3D prints is made of rubber [Music] pretty neat huh this stuff right here is called flexible PLA and it's a new type of filament on the market that might be a game changer for cosplay and armor Builders one of the biggest problems with flexible materials is getting a nice paint job on them now there are leather paints and rubber paints and there are methods to getting a nice paint job on things like TPU and ninjaflex but in this video I want to experiment with painting flexible pla just like normal pla let's see if we can make it happen [Music] [Music] all right hey guys what's up welcome back to the channel my name is Frank and I apologize for any background noise going on right now I got a couple printers over there but I think we should still be in good shape also welcome to the new garage and workshop if you guys are interested there's a whole video coming out about all of this in here and man it's a pretty cool maker space anyway for those of you that don't know I am an Iron Man cosplayer Builder and I like my Iron Man suits this is actually the current and original chest plate and neck to my mark 85 Iron Man suit and one problem that has always bugged me is the neck now typically the chest plate and The Traps sit on like this and the neck is supposed to sit up something like this and as you guys could already tell by my face this is kind of uncomfortable not the best so as a supplement for that oh my voice just cracked I've always let the neck kind of drop under so it kind of creates a little bit of a gap between my head and the helmet now this isn't terribly uncomfortable I can still move my neck left and right but it is rather stiff and keeping your head straight like this for six seven hours in a cosplay costume is not comfortable now many of you have commented on this many times hey why not print things like the neck and certain joints in flexible materials like ninja Flex or TPU well the first big reason is that they're kind of hard to print with I've tried printing with TPU before and while it's not too bad on direct drive the cleanup and post-processing of those materials isn't Fun on top of that they are notoriously hard to paint I really pride myself in my finishes and I like being able to take a good photo in my suit and having paint colors that don't match has just always bugged me but here comes ataraxia art and eventually Flash Forge with flexible pla now if you guys have ever tried to print with TPU you know you need to change retraction settings you need to slow the print down a lot and there's a lot of other little fine tuning tidbits you need to do in order to get TPU to print properly but this right here was my first flexible pla print using the ataraxia art and all I did was slow down the print speed that's it all I changed on this was the printing speed from normally 70 millimeters a second so I think I dropped it down to 40 millimeters a second and I didn't change a single other thing now for funsies I went and dusted this with gold spray paint just to see if it would crack and Flake off and guess what it really doesn't now I can induce really really dense cracks into it by folding it and really pushing it on there but that's not something you're going to be doing with armor the fact that I can take this and switch this around and the gold stays on for the most part that's not bad and this was just a gold dust of spray paint I didn't try the smoothest at all this part was printed on my creality cr-10s Pro V2 and that is a Bowden style setup I didn't even need to use a direct drive to print this however unfortunately after letting this sit out for a little bit too long it did get some moisture in it and it started to act weird on my Pro V2 flexible materials really love absorbing absorbing moisture a lot so you have to keep these things in bags typically I don't do that with my filament for this stuff you need to and honestly I was sleeping on this stuff for quite a while until I decided to jump back into my Mark 85. I've been printing an updated collar and chest system for my mark 85. these are updated files by the do3d the actual V2 files and I wanted them to look really nice however with that came a new neck this is drastically different than the old style you can see how differently shaped this is and with that came this new neck piece that I really wanted to be comfortable however printing it in solid pla just wasn't working I couldn't get it to a line right but then somebody suggested the flexible materials and I figured hey I got a couple boxes of this stuff sitting here let's see if we can paint this to look good and it turns out you can this neck piece was painted with the exact same paints I used on my mark 85 mostly now there's no clear coat top finish on this this is just the metal cast red but we're going to go through a couple different stages of painting this but I think from a distance that still looks pretty good and guess what I can actually move my neck in it that's amazing now before we continue let's go back inside onto the computer so I can show you a couple extra settings to change instead of just you know your speeds to try to get a much better flexible print okay so let's talk about settings for some reason I was getting the best results with this flexible pla on my soul sbo1 pro so that's the profile I'm going to show you guys I also did a couple prints on my elegoo Neptune 3 plus but they just weren't coming out quite as good even when I swapped over the filament from the uh from The Flash Forge to the ataraxia I was getting better results with the flash forwards flexible filament so maybe just go with that one right away and copy whatever settings I'm using here now this has a very basic 0.4 millimeter nozzle on it so I was going down to a pretty fine layer height now the normal 0.15 I can drop this down to a point zero as point zero point one two and that's a very fine layer height I want to try to let the printer put out as much quality as possible but if you want a rough print then you can increase the layer height that's totally up to you this isn't going to affect like how it prints it's just going to affect how it looks infill again that's totally up to the part you want to print I had one neck piece printed at a five percent infill and it was very flexible and Squishy however when I was trying to do a little bit of sanding on it and you'll see that in a little bit it was just kind of blowing through the wall like it just wasn't sanding right I upped to the infill density to 30 percent it made it a little more rigid but it was still very flexible so let's move to 30 now I don't think the infill pattern matters much in this case uh you can pick whatever is works for you I'm just gonna go right down the gyroid because I like using it printing temperatures now with the flash Forge filament I was getting great results at 220 and 215 and 220 where the ataraxia was happier at like 210. so in this case I'm going to use 215 and I always use 65 on my bed these are again still pretty standard pla settings however my print speed is where things really started to matter normally on my direct drive sv01 Pro I can run 80 to 90 millimeters a second most printers nowadays can do anywhere from 70 to 100 millimeters a second no problem in this case I'm going to drop this down to 40. now I haven't really played with higher speeds maybe I don't even need to change speed at all maybe I can let it print at its normal speed but for now to get you guys started just drop down the 40 it'll work now supports can be a big problem when printing flexible materials because your supports are now going to be squishy and flexible normally on pla I do like to change the support density as low as possible so the supports just really are brittle and just break away when it comes time to take the support off in this case I want to up the support density to give the flexible part some structure to actually print on so I'm going to bring this back up to like 30 Support over any angle I'm not changing that I usually run a 65 we do everywhere and again because this is a flexible material I want to give it as much structure as possible I'm going to use a raft this way all of the supports are connected to one surface and it just it so far it's made it print better now let's actually put this in some type of printable orientation I wanted to print something like that I'm happy and we're going to slice I'm pretty happy with that orientation not a lot of weird support it's going to break away super easy I've already printed this I know so I'm okay with that and depending on what you're printing you're going to have to change the orientation for survivability the less really tall supports the better but that's how I've been printing these things a pretty standard pla settings I'm just slowing things down and just trying to take into account that the supports are now going to be flexible and Squishy as well I am excited to continue to try to experiment with this to see how fast I can print it to maybe thin down the prints a little bit to make them even more flexible and get rid of walls and infill but yeah let's get back into the garage with a few of these printed and keep on keeping on okay so we're back outside in the garage and let's talk about sanding and smoothing a flexible pla now I tried a heat gun and this is something a lot of people use on TPU to try to smooth off over the layer lines and it really didn't work too well I tried a bunch of different settings and all of that it just kind of made it sticky and then eventually through the infill it kind of disfigured and warped so I if you can get it to work good luck I wasn't able to get the heat gun to work properly normally when sanding pla it discolors a little bit right you can see a big difference between the sanded and unsanded parts here right well flexible pla was giving me very similar results now it still isn't perfect and it definitely didn't sand and smooth as well as the normal pla but I was definitely able to sand that down and smooth out any imperfections like that looks pretty good and this was a very low quality print you're going to see in a few minutes that I was able to get much Superior prints out of this stuff than what this neck came out this was just a test we don't even want that one so you can sand this stuff which is pretty neat and again it doesn't sound as good as normal pla but that's definitely smoother so now let's hop upstairs into the paint booth and see the different stages of actually getting some paint on this thing all right first up let's look at just normal primer and this is just the DupliColor filler primer laid over it and it's not too bad actually it worked out pretty nicely I can Flex it it's not cracking off no real big issues here I'm actually kind of actually kind of impressed with how well this worked out but filler primer and normal primers aren't made for rubber material like this so what if there was a better option now the normal primer was working okay but let's use something that's actually made to flex this is just standard Plasti Dip type material this is actually a custom wrap peelable rubber by dupli color but you can get this in a bunch of different brands now you have to be really careful when spraying this stuff because it can glob up super quickly and that's not what we want you can see it just wasn't like leveling properly I probably didn't shake the can enough so very very light coats at first and then you can go start to go on heavy and this is what a heavy coat looks like over top of the neck piece now most of the layer lines have pretty much gone away and I could sit here and try to sand and smooth over this but honestly for just a neck piece I'm pretty happy with that especially the front I like how that looks and it's still nice and flexible and it's not going to crack the paint at all it's made for this type of stuff this is great now moving on to the gold coat because as you guys know for this Iron Man red color we use a gold base coat now initially on this original piece of flexible material I didn't sand it I didn't prime it I just hit it with the gold and you can see the layer lines there but still it adhered really nicely now this is a very similar piece this was a little bit of primer and then the gold and you can definitely still see tons of layer lines in there it really didn't come out that good at all but from a distance yeah it was Shiny Gold but I just wasn't the biggest fan of it but again look it flexes I'm not cracking it I can force a crack if I really bend it and flex it I can really start to mess up the paint but right now it's not going anywhere like this looks pretty good now this part was smoothed over a little bit more you can see that there's definitely way less layer lines here there is some Gunk but then now I could go over this and try to sand it back down a little now that I know I've gotten some coats on it I don't have to worry about damaging anything so let's try to take some sandpaper to this this is just some standard 220 grit sandpaper and let's see what happens so it is starting to peel up some of the plastic up here so it isn't looking the best so I would definitely try to sand this beforehand it is definitely smoothing it and I could go lighter on it but I think the care should have been given in the Plasti Dip stage in the flexible primer stage before moving on to this but again it definitely doesn't have as many layer lines as the other one so quality is definitely going to matter here your print quality try to print it at the lowest layer height possible like we had already talked about or you know just try to get the best quality out of your printer but we have the gold parts so what about layering up the red now this was the part I was most nervous about the metal cast red I thought this was going to make the paint way more fragile and brittle but that actually didn't come till later so after getting them pretty smooth just going through different stages I was actually I was actually starting to get some pretty good glossy results now it doesn't look as good as my chest plate no but again from a distance the nice five foot rule those are definitely metal cast red Parts if anything I went a little bit too heavy on the metal cast these are actually darker red than my suit so the final rendition of this the final perfect piece I just need to go a little bit lighter on it but again it's still flexible how however now the paint is starting to have some effects if I flex the paint too much it will start to kind of spider and crackle a little bit and you might not be able to see it let's see if I get the light on it in the right spot right there you can kind of see some of this the cracking however you're not going to be bending this piece like that now see if I bend it all the way back because I've I've stressed it Beyond its elasticity so now the paint is starting to take some effects so that's what you have to be careful of but I've also damaged the neck piece in total it's not just I've actually put a crease in the rubber now so you have to be careful with that but this neck piece I only want it to move a little bit I only want it to stretch open just a little bit it's not going to be getting folded over all of the time I just need it to be a little more comfortable so by moving it like that I'm definitely not stressing the paint Beyond its limit so why not it works now the next part was clear coating it look I'm in my paint booth the next part was actually getting a clear coat on this stuff so I went just all the way done with it I used the 1K high gloss clear coat now this made the paint the hardest it had ever been and I don't have any of those neck pieces still here I'll probably spray one of these real quick to test but this made the paint super flaky and brittle so I decided not to clear coat it I'm okay with this level of gloss I think this looks absolutely fine there's no point to put clear coat on it if you know it kind of gets the job done with that though I also did find a really nice gloss Plasti Dip clear coat this is meant to go over the Plasti Dip I showed you in the prime stage so what if we end up using this stuff will this give it the proper protection and gloss and not really risk the paint cracking or flaking as bad as the normal 1K clear coat did let's find out all right so the clear coats mostly dry I actually ran out of the normal high gloss so I ended up using the gloss pearl finish and it they look pretty much the same except this one has some Pearl flakes in it and not too bad like it looks good it definitely gave it a nice glossy finish but maybe you guys can hear it if I put it near the mic you hear the cracking and the crackling now well it's making the paint kind of spider and Flake now which isn't what we want that's gonna be a problem it made the paint a lot more fragile does it still work is it still you know nice and flexible as much as we need it to be yeah but then the Plasti Dip one here's it next to the mic it doesn't crackle at all so you still get a nice top coat kind of finish that you know looks shiny and reflective but it's a lot more flexible and feels a lot more sturdy than the normal clear coat so I'd call this an absolute success it's definitely going to help protect it and again we're not flexing it in and out too much all right guys so what did we learn through all of this I know for a fact there's probably Clips out there on my own channel of me saying I don't want to use flexible materials because you can't quite paint them the same as normal Plastics and honestly looking at these can you even really tell which one has the flexible neck I personally don't think so then again I know the answer and so do you but that looks pretty good and one of these next is going to be way more comfortable than the other when wearing it for a long period of time now there's definitely still some refinement to do this one and this one are probably the two best ones I've gotten out of the back but like I said before I have like an ultimate quality one that's currently being painted upstairs I still need I still need to go and paint the gunmetal details into this and that'll make it look I think a lot better and break up some of like the imperfections in there but I'm really happy with it go out and test and experiment with this stuff this is a new filament this is breaking new grounds so don't be afraid to get your hands dirty and run a few tests now there are alternatives to this that give you way more Flex like dragon skin mold casting Emily's been working on that for a little while for her new suit and her results are awesome however that's more steps you have to print the mold you have to cast the mold you have to do a lot of different stuff to that where in this case I can just print the flexible thing paint it and for the most part be done so whichever way you want to approach it to getting flexible parts that's totally up to you but I'm definitely not done experimenting with these flexible filaments and everything especially with my new Mark 85 and works if I can really nail down the paint job and post-processing this could you imagine the entire AB section or the Cobb piece of an Iron Man suit in flexible printable material that would be that would be incredible so I wanted to get this video out sooner than later to start giving you guys some ideas on how to expand Paramount with this stuff show you the settings I've been using because man Instagram has been asking and hopefully you guys can teach me something in the long run that'd be awesome while filming this I actually just got done printing the back of the neck part because I kind of like didn't think about it I'm like oh I did the front and Squishy material but why don't we do the back so when I lean back it doesn't you know dig into my neck so uh yeah I gotta go and print this and like just look how shiny and nice that came out that is a very good quality flexible print I am more than happy with that so as always if you guys have any comments questions concerns or tips and tricks maybe even using this material for a while and you found a great way to post process it leave some comments down below I will be making follow-up videos to this I am going to be experimenting more with this stuff and I'm excited and if you liked what you saw in today's video please consider subscribing to the channel I have tons of more videos coming out like this and with more armor builds in the future and more 3D printing videos I'm very excited to share it all with you and the last thing is if you are interested in watching my live workshops and builds and chatting with me I do have a twitch Channel now it's going to be very different from my normal YouTube live videos those aren't going anywhere but if you want to come hang out and work with me on the bench and ask questions and get just little little quick in-depth live tutorials definitely go check out my twitch channel it's been a lot of fun and guys thank you so much for all the support so far on Twitch YouTube Instagram Tick Tock everywhere like it's been incredible um I cannot wait to show you guys more videos and more builds so as always thank you so much for watching and you guys have a good day foreign [Music]

Channel: Frankly Built

Views: 135,213

Keywords: 3d printing, flexible 3d prints, tpu, how to paint tpu, how to paint flexible filaments, flexible filaments, ninjaflex, how to print ninjaflex, tpu settings, tpu print profile, flexible pla, flexible pla settings, flexible pla profile, how to 3d print, how to 3d print flexible materials, flexible armor, flexible cosplay, can you paint tpu?, can you paint ninjaflex?, can you paint flexible pla, flexible PLA+, how to paint cosplay, how to paint armor

Id: gLgKcZVfrj4

Length: 19min 22sec (1162 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 18 2023