My Secret To Hiding 3D Printed Layer Lines

today you will learn how to take your boring 3D printed parts and turn them into something awesome with a simple slicing technique called fuzz if you're tired of seeing layer lines on your 3D printed components and want to have customer ready products with no postprocessing then you've come to the right place my friend this video alone could save you thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars as it did for me in manufacturing costs I started experimenting with postprocessing about 10 years ago with my solidoodle 3D printer I used acetone to smooth out the layer lines and abs Parts it kind of worked but it was very inconsistent and not to mention extremely dangerous it involved heating the acetone until it started to evaporate but at that point it became highly flamable which is why I don't recommend it method number two I've been doing for quite a while now but it's quite inefficient I call it the sand primer paint method first you sand the parts down with rough sandpaper followed by a coat of fil primer you have to repeat your sand and primer steps for several days until your layer lines disappear each round you use a finer and finer grit sandpaper once your part is nice and smooth then you can move on to adding several layers of paint which involves sanding before every coat and again could take several days it's a great process if you only have to do a few parts it just doesn't scale well therefore I started looking for a better process last year I launched one of my first inventions the Wake Hydro alarm clock it's a clock that doesn't shut off until you drink a glass of water I manufactured each clock myself but I wasn't satisfied with the 3D printed finish I spent a whole month over the summer just sanding primering and painting these clocks in the backyard of my apartment one day it was raining so I spray painted the parts in the basement of the duplex when my neighbor came home she was really upset because her whole house smelled like spray paint it also gave her a headache and she was not happy about that and ended up leaving the building for several hours whoops since the spray paint method wasn't going too well uh I started looking for a better manufacturing process for the enclosure of the clock so I started reaching out to several injection molding facilities and provided them the 3D file needed to make an injection mold this had me really excited until I got back the quote each mold was going to cost about $10,000 and I needed three separate molds that's just the upfront cost to take a block of aluminum cut it out to make a mold that's why I say this could save you thousands of dollars since injection molding wasn't within my budget I moved on to my next idea resin 3D printing resin 3D printing is the process in which light is used to Pure resin layer by layer which forms a 3D part resin 3D printers tend to be faster than traditional fdm printers because there's less moving parts and resin 3D printers can make parts with higher quality because each layer is only several microns thick with that in mind resin 3D printing sounded like a great idea to me I purchased the creality pallet light resin printer which was incredibly affordable and really well built if you ask me like the injection Ming idea I was once again very excited about resid printing I started by doing a couple test parts to make sure that all the settings were correct and then I moved on to try to 3D print an entire enclosure for the weight Hydro alarm the first attempt was a fail second attempt fail third attempt also fail fail fail fail fail it just wasn't working parts kept breaking off while being printed or getting stuck to the bottom of the resin tray not to mention that resin 3 printing is really messy resin tends to just drip everywhere plus it's toxic so you can't really let it touch your skin but finally I worked out all the settings and was able to successfully 3D print and enclosure for the clock but there were two problems one it was warped and two it was brittle which meant there was no way that I could use that as a product for an in customer I kept trying and 3D printed several more enclosures but they kept coming out wared and brittle after several weeks of frustration I crossed resin 3D printing off my list of a viable option for 3D printing products that meant I was back to fdm 3D printing and the good old Sam primer paint method that was until one day I I was looking at my Amazon Alexa and I was admiring how the rough texture on the top hid any imperfections and then it hit me instead of making a product that looks smooth and Polished what if I made a product that was intentionally rough by having a rough surface I could get away with having little imperfections such as layer lines if not hide them all together my first attempt to texture the surface was by using blender I exported the 3D file out of fusion 360 as an STL and then uploaded Ed it to blender I tried to texture the surface with a 2D image it ended up looking something like this once again fail but I didn't give up after doing some research I found out that bamboo Studio has a slicing feature called fuzzy skin kind of a silly name but it was exactly what I was looking for this one little feature had me really excited for two reasons one I bought the bamboo lab a130 printer to make customer Parts because of its Crazy Fast Print speeds and two fuzzy skin just might be the solution to my decade long postprocessing problem the fuzzy skin effect is caused by randomly shaking the tool head while printing the wall path there are multiple options for adding fuzzy skin to your part in bamboo Studio the options are none Contour contour and holes all walls the difference between contour and holes versus all walls is that the all wall setting will put fuzzy skin on the outside and in inside of your wall but that's kind of silly because the inside of your wall no one will ever see that's where the infield takes place I would avoid using the all wall setting because it's just going to waste time for something that nobody's ever going to see I personally like to use the Contour option bamboo Studio has two settings for fuzzy skin fuzzy skin distance point which is the average distance from fuzz point to fuzz point and fuzzy skin thickness which is how far the fuzz protrudes out from the part wall I wasn't sure what variables to use to get the roughness that I was looking for so I did what any great scientist would do I ran an experiment I 3D printed 24 parts that were identical STL files but changed the fuzz variables for every single one of them I use value 0.1 to 0.3 for the fuzz thickness and I use values 0.1 to 0.8 for the fuzz distance here's a chart with the fuzz values and the finished results I made part number zero as a baseline with no fuzz setting at all hopefully my experiment will help save you some time with determining your favorite fuzz combination my favorite combination was number nine which has 0.3 thickness and 0.3 distance came out quite nice with the fuzz values all figured out I loaded up the weight Hydro alarm clock into bamboo Studio to add fuzz to your model click other on the preview page scroll down to fuzz skin you will need to select your fuzz option followed by entering your fuzz values then click slice plate Follow by print blink my bamboo lab A1 started printing automatically with use of the AMS helmet exchanger I love the AMS it's so cool it took about 3 and 1/ half hours for the A1 to 3D print this part and it looks awesome within seconds I was able to remove the support material and there was no more postprocessing needed to be done you can see the difference between a regular 3D printer part and a part 3D printed with fuzz makes the world of difference one thing that I really like about having the settings at 0.3 and 0.3 is that the texture is very similar to the texture of the heated bed now for the finished product here is the OG wake Hydro mini and here is the new and improved wake Hydro mini with the fuzzy skin it just looks so much better and it even feels stronger which is really cool if you gave this product to a random person walking down the street they probably wouldn't even realize that it was 3D printed I just love looking at this knowing how much time and energy it took to get to this point now before you go and try to print your own Parts with fuzzy skin there are two things you should know one adding fuzzy skin increases your print time this part alone took about an hour longer than this part just because of the fuzzy skin and number two more importantly fuzzy skin will disrupt any tolerances that you may have of interlocking parts that means that anywhere that parts are interlocking you will need to adjust the tolerances in the 3D model to accommodate for the fuzz because again it's protruding out from the original part otherwise you're going to be having to sand Your Parts down by hand and if we're looking to scale we weren to avoid that part of the process and with that I will leave you with one last word of advice it brings me a lot of joy to look at this product right here because I know how much time and energy went into getting to this point as I shared with you today there was a lot of failure along that path but don't be afraid of failure if something doesn't work then just try again don't ever stop fail your way to success if that's what you have to do I would have never been able to create this incredible invention if I had given up at any one of those failure points that I shared with you today whatever it is that you're trying to build just keep trying if you would like to purchase the Wake Hydro alarm clock or any other of my inventions to support this channel go on over to jm.com sstore I'll put a link Down Below in the description I think that the Wake Hydro alarm : is the greatest way to wake up in the morning and one last thing I've started a patron program on my website for anyone who wants to support this Channel and help me in my journey of becoming inventor and bringing manufacturing back to the United States of America there's different levels to it and more information will be coming out soon but if you'd like to become a patron of my channel you can go to jm.com Patron now friends go be creative and build something awesome also make sure to subscribe for next week's episode

Channel: Jake Grim

Views: 157,591

Keywords: How-to videos, Educational inventions, DIY projects, Innovative ideas, Creative solutions, Learning hacks, Life hacks, Science experiments, Hands-on learning, Educational entertainment, Fun experiments, Creative learning, Inventive tutorials, Step-by-step guides, Practical tips, Educational discoveries, Innovative teaching, DIY inventions, Science for kids, Innovative technology, Innovative designs, Problem-solving, Educational crafts, Learning with fun, How it works

Id: OBQ2lVl3Qnc

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2024