Genius Smoothing Tip for your 3D Prints!

there was no way that I wasn't going to try this hey everybody Uncle Jesse here I saw the craziest post over on Reddit by Rob Bob you choose that was showing off how they printed off this troll tablet holder from the art of Gomez they were showing off in that Reddit post how they used a soldering iron to weld the seams of the arm together and it's seamless and why this is so crazy to me is if you've ever tried this with a 3D print using a soldering iron you basically just melt the parts together and it is nowhere near as clean as what they were showing off there in that Reddit post one thing that they called out in their post was that they were using a temperature controlled soldering iron that I ended up picking up one of these as well for myself off of Amazon I'll have this exact one linked down below I think it was like 15 bucks or so so pretty affordable and worthwhile for me to try out here to see how well this works and fingers crossed were able to get the same type of results that they were seeing on that post this is a free file that you can actually download and print for yourself if you wanted to try this out or if you just wanted to print one of these for yourself and again it's by Art of Gomez by the way the title of the file says it's a troll tablet support free STL file yeah it's it's not it's not a support free there's like a comma that should be in there you are definitely going to need supports for this and I ended up running this through prusa slicer and used the tree supports for this again and for the most part all of the prints look fairly good that came off of the Neptune 3 Pro and one area that I did see an issue with were some of the supports ended up failing on the troll however they ended up sort of recovering from the failure itself and for the most part the prince turned out fantastic and I printed all these at point one two layer height I wanted these to be really finely detailed now one other trick that they were using in their post or at least I don't know if it's necessarily a trick or not but they were using a marble pla I don't have a marble pla I have this vanilla bean ice cream from printed solid they're Jesse pla this is actually 3D printing nerds one of his filaments there that I love printing with and I printed all these pieces with it and I believe part of the trick here is that because it's not just a flat color there's a little bit of deviation with the different little dots and marks there that it's going to help blend the semen a little bit better but we'll see how that goes now after getting some of the supports removed I do have some further defects that I'm seeing with the the bust portion or the top torso of the print there under one of the arms on both of them it looks like just the supports did not catch one particular little corner there so I've got a little bit of a divot that I'm going to have to try and fill when joining the arms to the upper body portion here also there's some earrings that are printed here that are super thin that didn't fully connect while this was printing I do love these new slim tree supports but they're a pain to remove and the supports just go flying like shooting across the room when I'm removing these so you just have to take your time take your time especially on these smaller smaller prints here kind of makes me Miss resin 3D printing here oh my God this is this is by the way the perfect resin 3D print file so here's a great example of once you have all those tree supports removed you're going to end up with a whole bunch of rough areas where you have any flat surface contact and so this hopefully won't be too big of an issue because the rest of the body itself looks nice and clean but when we put the top and the lower half together here the loin cloth here that the troll is wearing nicely for the most part covers up the seam here where the stomach is there's a small very small one there but the same goes for the feet as well so once you get the feet put on there the little fur from the feet will actually cover up the seam of where the legs connect so you only really end up with the arm seams like this here and before we can even get into actually getting in here and trying to weld this together I'm going to try and further sand this a little bit more flushly here so it sits a little bit closer so we have a little less to fill and while I'm saying anything smooth I want to say thank you to elgu for sponsoring today's video I ended up printing all of the parts in today's video the elegu Neptune 3 Pro and helicu is having a massive sale on bundles of filaments as well as resin I think this might be the first time that I've ever seen bundles of resin that you can now buy in bulk and it's saving you a ton of money if you're interested in more information about any of elugu's products you'll find links to those down below alright so I've made a huge mess but I've got the parts relatively smoothed out and the seams seem to be the seam seem to be a little bit closer together so I'll have a little bit less of a gap that I need to go in there and try and fill the other thing that I want to call out is that what's nice about this soldering iron that I picked up it has a bunch of different tips that I can try and work with the one that I'm going to be starting with and I think is probably going to work the best is this one that has a flat Edge to it it's almost like a knife I think I'll be able to better smooth down areas in a wide flat pressing Motion versus something that's around it or a rounded tip that I'll have a little bit harder of a time getting something flush and smooth this is temperature controlled as well so I'm going to drop this down to 170 degrees which should be very similar to like slightly less than what you're typically printing with with pla but it should still allow it to be fairly malleable and meltable also the good news about making this big mess is that I can use some of these scrap pieces here for testing this out or trying to make this actually work to fill the void there I'm actually looking for here's an example of a hand that didn't quite print right so I'm going to use this I also have a test piece that I went off and printed that I cut off that I can now try and test out this welding method before we apply it to the full finished figure here so what I can do is I can take the pieces of the thin strips and try and Slot it in there to help try and fill the void from the the from the two prints that actually all right I just need to I just need to do that I just need to do that over and over again here maybe that's the trick I need to put a little bit of filament in there and then use that to weld the pieces together also the 185 temperature seems to work fair is working fairly well for me at the moment not perfect but I'm honestly very impressed with how a few of the parts turned out where it's kind of hard to see where that seam was on the one side of the arm the other you can definitely see where I jack things up to start with so I think I'm ready to get started with the actual bust here and getting the arms welded on there but one thing that I'm going to do first is just apply a little bit of 3D gloop into the arm here so I don't have to worry about holding this in place and the arm falling out while I'm working on any of this what I am finding to be really helpful is using some of these tree supports and cutting slivers of the tree supports off because they are slightly thicker than just the little brim that printed along with these files and one quick note about using the soldering iron if you want to you could obviously wear a respirator or something like that I'm not too overly concerned because the temperature is pretty low and there's no direct smoke or anything coming off of the prince again use your own discretion if you want to wear a respirator or not since this is only at 185 and it's very slowly melting it I figure it's got to be just as safe as just regular Printing and I don't ever wear masks when I'm just standing here printing with PLA and the trickiest part that I found so far with this project is just where to get started with all of it so just shove some filament into the little crack there and start melting away and trying to smooth out that seam [Music] foreign [Music] and here are the results of this little experiment here and I have to say it turned out good it's not as good as what I saw the original poster did over on Reddit but I think with a little bit more practice and with a little bit more patience as well I could help really refine this even further I will say it was about an hour's worth of work very carefully trying to fill those seams and then smoothing everything out and the best method I did seem to find was taking some of the brims there that I had from my prints that are very thin and I'm able to shove them into the crevices and even double them up in some cases and they melt really quickly there and then you're able to very easily smooth those out the other option that I found that worked fairly well for the larger gaps was just breaking off some of the support material and shoving that into the cracks now this method for hiding the seams is probably best used for anybody that is not planning on painting your 3D prints and you just want to leave it as a raw print if you are planning on painting this is way too time consuming in my opinion you just want to fill those up with some spot putty or something along those lines to help that and then you can just smooth them out and then go about painting and finishing whatever it is that you're Printing and one area that I was running into a lot of issues is in the armpit area I just it's such a tight area to get into I thought it was having a really hard time not jacking up the rest of the model by trying to smooth out some of those seams so for the most part I'm still gonna have some seams in those really tight to reach areas I also wanted to take a minute to say a big thank you to all my patreon supporters for your continued support of me making content here on the interwebs if you're interested in my 3D printer settings you can find those over in my patreon and let me know what you guys thought about this little project here of filling in those seams with a soldering iron and if you'd attempt this or if you have any other tips or suggestions on how to get a better finish quality by attempting this I thought it was a really fun and simple way to go about this and definitely has its specific use cases but might be applicable for some of you out there hey thanks so much for watching it all and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Uncle Jessy

Views: 202,300

Keywords: Uncle Jessy, 3D Printing, 3D Printed, 3D Printer, Cosplay, Elegoo Neptune 3 Plus, Elegoo Neptune 3 Max, Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro, Neptune 2, Neptune 2S, Resin 3D Printer, Large 3D printer, Fast 3D printer, Bambulab X1 Carbon, Pre-Order, Pre Sale, Cosplay 3D printer, UncleJessy4Real, 3D Printing Shop, Make Money 3D Printing, 3d printing for beginners, Huge 3D printer, Affordable Large, Large 3D Printer, 3D Print Seams, Welding, Smooth Welding, Soldering Iron, Troll, Miniatures

Id: bZOORQ1Oj2A

Length: 10min 53sec (653 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2023