Transcript:
Hey, you guys, I’m with Jesse here? In today’s video, we’re gonna be taking a look at a different way of smoothing your fdm 3d prints by using resin. That’s right, the same resin that you can use in a 3d printer. We’re going to be applying to your fdm 3d prints and seeing how well it’ll help smooth out those layer lines and no. Not by just pouring it on your prints. That’s probably a horrible idea. I actually saw this for the first time a few weeks ago over on Galactic Armory’s channel in one of his videos that he casually mentions that he smooths his 3d prints with resin from a 3d printer. And it kind of blew my mind and can’t believe. I haven’t thought of trying that myself so today. I really want to run through that process with you all and see how it works for me with one of these iron man face plates, where one side I want to be completely smooth and on the other, There’s lots of little detail that I want to make sure still looks as best as possible before we run off an attempt to paint it, so a few things that we’re going to need for this project. Obviously you’re going to need something that you’ve 3d printed. This is Niko industrie’s. Iron man faceplate. It has some amazing back detail on this faceplate and it’s part of a larger project build that I’m going to be doing here over the upcoming weeks and trying to finish and show you guys here. That’s this really cool display stand. I’ll have links down below to Nikko’s site where you can pick this up for yourself. I highly recommend it’s a really great file and normally when it comes to smoothing prints like this. I just use wood filler. This has been my go-to for years now, and I’ve done a video on this that you can find up in the corner here. If you haven’t already seen that this stuff, this is Bondo wood filler. It’s super easy to apply, and you just rub it on with your fingers, and it gets into all the nooks and crannies and allows you to more easily smooth out your prints, and it dries relatively quickly. Maybe within 30 minutes to an hour, it’ll be completely dry where you can then run off and start sanding it down, smooth, another really great way to smooth. Your prints is with XTC 3d This is a two-part mixture That’s made by the folks over at Smooth-on and again I’ve been using this for a number of years now. The benefit of this over bondo wood filler is that it also adds strength to your prints. This is going to really help solidify it and make it one cohesive, solid unit. It is a little bit harder to sand initially when you get started with it and it also has about. I want to say it’s like a three to four hour to even 24 hour cure time. And if you don’t get the mixture quite right, you’re gonna end up with a really tacky surface. Another go-to for a lot of folks are the bondo products. This was a huge tub of bondo that I bought. I don’t know, four years ago, and I just haven’t touched it since, uh, yeah, this stuff stinks, not stinks as in bad. It’s just it smells really bad and it’s gonna stink up. This isn’t anything I can use in my house. I have to use it out in the garage, but it’s pretty easy to work with and again. There’s an applicator that you need to apply to it to help make it more a cohesive thing that you can easily smooth on and dry up, and then there’s also the spot putty, which I do use quite a bit for finishing off a lot of my pieces. So what I’ll end up doing is using wood filler for the most part, sanding, smooth, applying some primer to that, and then if there’s any little spots or divots, I’ll fill that with the spot putty again. I can just work this in with my finger and then let it dry. It takes maybe 10 to 15 to 20 minutes for this to dry, and then you can easily sand over it again and then probably the easiest cheapest option that a lot of people go to is just this automotive. Actually, sorry, this is automotive primer, but there’s two in one primer filler that you can also pick up that I’ll use. I’ve done that on a number of my other props where I don’t really feel like putting down XTC 3d or wood filler. I just don’t really care about the finish all that much, but I still want it to be a little bit smoother and not see all the print lines. I’ll just apply a few coats of primer filler and it really helps cut down on those layer lines and for this resin smoothing, obviously we’re going to need some resin. So this is a good time for me to mention today’s video sponsor, which is elgu today. I’m going to be using Elgoose. This is their water washable ceramic gray, which is a little bit more of a liquidy, really thin liquid resin and then their abs like resin, which is a thicker resin. So I’m going to be trying out. Both of these. The thicker is going to be applied to the front of the face faceplate. And then the thinner is going to be on the back with all the details and hopefully fingers crossed. This works really well, And then I should also mention that. It was all printed on the LG. Neptune 2 Fdm 3 printer, A huge thank you to elgu for sponsoring this week’s video and the channel here. If you’re interested in any of the links for any of the elgu products that I’m using in today’s video, you’ll find links down below. Hopefully the Neptune 2 comes back in stock soon again, getting ridiculously good prints off of that 3d printer. All right to get started with this. We’re going to need a few other things. We’re going to need some gloves to wear. Obviously, if we’re working with resin, you don’t want to be getting this on any of your skin. You’re also going to want either. A chip brush or I’m going to be using these foam brushes here that I have on hand because I just don’t have any chip brushes readily available, and then I’m also going to be using these little containers. I have a big bag of these that I picked up from Walmart. These are like little jello shot containers that we’re going to use for pouring in the resin to our mix and again I’m going to be using two different resins for this test, and I’m also going to be using one of these UV lights that I have for curing all the resin for my prints that I have in a big bucket in the other room. If you don’t have one of these, don’t worry what you can do is just coat your print in resin and then sit it out in the sun to cure in the direct sunlight First up, we have this abs like gray resin. I’m just going to put a little bit here on this brush. The nice part about this as well is any leftover resin. You can just pour directly back into the container and I’m just going to start thinly brushing this on here and we’ll see how this goes more than likely you can end up putting a few coats on this as well. If you wanted to, were going to see what the results are like. After putting just a thin layer of this and again, it’s a little bit thicker of a resin, so it’ll be interesting to see how much detail loss I might end up having with this versus the other. Maybe there’s there’s nothing, but it’ll just be an interesting test to see, so I’m gonna get this painted on, and then we’ll check it out, all right, so I’ve got my regular lens on. I was trying a wide angle lens, and I just I’m not a big fan of how it’s looking, so I’ve got the resin coated here on the front. I’ve tried to make sure that there’s no pooling in any of the eye pieces here or any of the gaps, so just lightly brushing over after letting this settle for about 30 seconds or so, and now it’s time to kick on the UV light and the great part about this is it should cure pretty quickly, so I’m going to make sure to move this little container filled with extra resin out of the way I’m also as I’m using this just letting you know I’m using one of these Wham-bam silicone mats, love these things perfect for a project like this because it helps keep everything contained within the mat, and then anything that cures here I can just easily peel off or I can just wipe down, so I’m just going to move this all around the print here to try and get this cured, and it shouldn’t take very long to do more than likely. I’ll put down at least one other coat of resin on it, and then we’ll see how it looks. Uh, before we move over to the back side of the faceplate, That’s already cured on there very quickly, and it’s, uh, it’s hard for me to explain, but the touch, it’s extremely smooth, very, very smooth surface now, so I am going to do one more coat as I mentioned there and we’ll check it out after that. All right now that everything’s cured. I’m just going to hit it with a little bit of sandpaper. This is 220 grit, sandpaper. Hopefully this is enough to do the job here. It should be enough to give this just a light sanding before we run off and hit it with some primer and we’ll see what the results look like. [MUSIC] All right, and here’s the primed print and it looks really good. I’m very impressed with the results of how smooth this is with the minimal amount of work that we put into this with just maybe 15 minutes of effort, all in all with the actual painting and then sanding and then priming, it was really straightforward and easy. It’s not 100 perfect. I still need to go back through and do some further sanding on this to clean up some of the lines. I also did a rust job with the painting and it’s still really cold and snowing outside here, so it’s not exactly the optimal temperature and whatnot for laying down paint, but in general for this experiment. I think it worked really well on the back side where we had all of the detail. I’m still not 100 sure if it was the primer that I put down just a little bit too much, and I lost the detail here, or if it was some of the resin that I put in and I ended up just it’s it’s really faint and hard to see some of the texturing. That’s on the back side of the of the face piece here, but I think it again looks really good and I didn’t really do any sanding other than just in a few small locations here. It’s pretty much ready for painting at this point on the backside and again on the front side here I could as well go in with just a little bit more spot putty if needed and fill in any divots and further sand out like around the eyes here still needs a good bit of cleanup with my dremel or files just to really smooth out some of the angles there that we’re seeing around the eyes. I would highly recommend trying out galactic armory’s method of smoothing out your prints by applying some resin to it. Thank you again to elgoo for sponsoring today’s video. Thank you to Nico for supplying the file here and really looking forward to printing this out again. I’ll have links down below to his site where you can check this out for yourself. This file is going to look absolutely wild Once I have it fully set up and assembled also. I want to say a big. Thank you to all my patreon members. If you’re interested in becoming one of my patrons, you can find links down below, or you can see more information about my patreon. Hey, thanks again for watching you guys. Hopefully you enjoyed and let me know in the comments. What you think of again smoothing out your prints with resin? This is a really wild idea. If you have any other suggestions around this that, maybe I just haven’t fully thought through. Let me know, wouldn’t mind digging into this a little bit further, but I will for sure be using this more with my fdm prints moving forward. Hey, thanks again for watching you guys. And I’ll see you next time. Bye now! It was all of maybe 15 minutes that I spent on that, uh?