How to Clean Up 3d Prints

hi good morning this surfs growth and dr. VAX channel and today we're going to look at how to turn prints that come right off the print bed there might be full of strings and supports into beautiful beautiful printed objects and the tools that I recommend for doing that okay stay tuned and let's learn something together [Music] [Applause] [Music] so there are a variety of types of cleanup that you need to do when you finish with a 3d print now 3d printing is no different than any other manufacturing process if you make something after out of wood after you complete it you sand it and you stain it that's post-processing if you make something of injection molding you have to trim it afterwards even when you bake a cake you frost it afterwards so we shouldn't expect that 3d printed objects will be absolutely perfect when they come off the printer there are two levels of post-processing you can use with 3d printing the first is to leave the original material but just clean up supports and brims and rafts and strings off the object that's what we're going to talk about today the next level would be to further sand down Prime and paint those objects in which case the original plastic is no longer visible that's going to be for another day let's start with a very simple example here here you'll see an example of a print this is actually a calibration print that is full of stringing and there are a variety of techniques we could use for removing those strings we could use a needle nose pliers and carefully pull off various strings but that is a tedious and long process and altar of is to just use a heat gun and a heat gun is remarkable at this what it basically does is it heats up the strings causing them to retract and in essence it makes them seemingly disappear so we're going to take this object full of strings and we're going to hit it with a blast of hot air from a heat gun and you will notice that the springs almost completely disappear now there's a side effect here and that is that it did heat up these tall very small structures and caused them to begin to melt so Wow you can use a heat gun to remove strings very quickly you have to use it selectively and carefully in this particular case we need to use a combination of a heat gun and some other mechanism let's see here I could take and use a snip or a horizontal cutter to continue to clean this up now another cleanup that is necessary is to clean up supports on in this particular case this print has a raft on the bottom and supports under these overhangs well the raft generally will pull off directly off the bottom by just carefully bending it as you work your way around the object so we're going to pull the raft up and we're actually going to see here that the majority in this case of the supports came off with the raft so one of the advantages of using a raft is very often the supports will come off with the raft leaving us with a almost pristine object really in very very good condition now there is a bit of defects there are a bit of defects on the bottom of this object so the variety of ways we can use to clean those up one would be once again to go back to our horizontal cutter and to begin cleaning up those defects on the bottom another approach we can use for the bottom defects is we can use an emery board that people use for their nails and this makes a very nice type of sandpaper for cleaning up because it has a support on it so we can take and clean up the bottom and in that affair erase all of the defects that way but there's another very interesting way to clean up models and in I'm going to actually use that to clean up this raft as if it was a model so if I wanted to take these particular components off the bottom of the raft once again I can just pry them off but you can see it left quite a bit of material left on there now a common way to clean those off would be to use a small knife and to slice those off as I did there you have to be very careful this is a bit dangerous you have to be very careful and it is difficult to get underneath those items let's take this other one off here these other two and you can see they're still plastic on the bottom here and if we wanted to remove that it's pretty hard to get that off so once again we could go to sandpaper we could start snipping those and this works pretty well snipping those and then pulling them off with our needlenose pliers but there's a magical tool for cleaning up prints and I want to show it to you now that tool let me put my heat gun aside you get that out of the way that tool is called a hot knife now this looks like a regular soldering iron the difference is that a wood burner or a regular soldering iron actually gets too hot for our purposes depending on the device it can go from a few hundred degrees to about 600 degrees Fahrenheit 212 degrees is approximately a hundred degrees centigrade is exactly under grade three centigrade the temperature that water boils and you really want your heat gun to go up to about 220 250 degrees depending on the material maybe 300 degrees centigrade you don't want to go high hotter than that if you go too hot then you're going to burn or discolor the plastic so let's put this wood burner way and let's look at this hot knife now this is called a hot knife because there are a number of attachments that you can put on the end of this knife right now I actually have a knife blade on the end most hot knives are also used for a variety of other craft work including stamping so they come with ends that have a variety of shapes let's see if you can see this particular shape here the shapes that I find most useful are these flat shapes because I can use them to remove imperfections from my prints this is the one I use most often so I can use this in essence to iron the print and smooth out defects but for right now let's take and we're going to use our hot knife I'm going to turn it on here and this particular hot knife is temperature controlled once again that's very very important because if I set it too high I will actually burn the plastic instead of cutting it or melting it so I'm going to set this to about 230 degrees and we'll give it a minute here to come up to temperature let's just use it as an example on here to give you an example to see how this cuts it's basically slicing this like you would slice butter and you end up with a very very nice edge when you do that so this is called a hot knife it is used in the craft industry when it comes up to speed you can see it slices very nicely just like you're slicing through butter and you end up with a very nice edge so we could use that on these spheres here on the very end to very carefully slice off these strings the strings that were really not practical to remove with the hot gun because it was melting the spheres and this is really the best possible way to clean up an object okay replace the knife blade flat end here let's let this come up to temperature and once it's up to temperature I can use that to iron surfaces and smooth out completely a surface or in essence reshape a surface so if I wanted to add a bevel on the edge here I could add a bevel on the edge here because in essence I'm melting or ironing this plastic okay so we've seen a variety of tools that we can use for finishing models we can use the needle nose pliers for pulling off support we can use a dag no cutter or a snip for snipping off supports we can use a knife blade directly or we can use a hot knife with a variety of tips right now I have an ironing tip in this hot knife finally for removing strings we saw that we can use a hot gun a heat gun you have to be careful because it will melt very delicate features if you're not careful oh thanks so much for watching I hope you learned something today if you did please give me a thumbs up subscribe to the channel and let's continue learning things together [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Make With Tech (MakeWithTech)

Views: 107,921

Keywords: 3d printer, 3d printing, 3d printers for beginners, removing supports, removing 3d print supports, removing supports from 3d print, removing 3d print rafts, cleaning up 3d prints, tools to remove supports, hot knife, hot knife cutting, finishing 3d prints, finishing 3d prints 101, punished props finishing 3d prints, 3d printing for beginners, 3d print smoothing, 3d print smoothing pla, 3d print smoothing heat gun, smoothing 3d prints, 3d print cleanup, 3d printing 101

Id: TR2DYi6B5YQ

Length: 11min 27sec (687 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 29 2019