Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Vapor Smoothing 3D printed objects with acetone”.
This is caleb with make today we’re going to talk a little bit about 3d printing. A common topic is: how do you finish off your prints? To look nice? Not everybody loves the little ridges, so we’re going to talk about how to make them smoother, specifically a reliable way of going from this to this people who print with abs know that acetone melts it. So we’re going to use that same principle with some acetone to expose the abs prints to some of the acetone vapors. This melts the surface, a tiny bit allowing it to smooth out you’ll, lose some detail, but you’ll get that nice smooth finish it’s up to you, which one you want more the detail or the smooth finish building.
This is very easy: we’re going to do the cold, vapor method, which means we’re not going to heat it up. It’S safer. That way, all you need is some 100 acetone, some paper towels a little bit of aluminum foil and a container to hold it all.
Okay, let’s put this together real quick. It’S really easy. Take your container! You drop in a paper towel on the bottom and then we start putting paper towels down the sides.
These are going to wick up some of the acetone help spread around the vapors. A good tip here is to leave one side without a paper towel, so you can peek in your container and see what your print looks like without having to open it. What you’re going to do is go to a well ventilated area, pour acetone in drop in your aluminum foil, so that your print is not actually touching acetone. That would be bad. Then you put your print in there and you close it up. That can now sit for up to several hours. It’S not a very fast process, depending on how much acetone there is in there, you’ll get the feel for how long it takes to get the surface that you want for your print now. Another tip here is that even after you take it out, it’s going to continue to smooth out a little bit so you’re going to have to get to where you can predict and take it out a little bit before it’s at the desired point. With a little bit of practice, you’ll get it down.
Here’S some time lapse. Footage to show you what to expect. This is about three hours worth of footage in a fairly large chamber, and you can see it took quite some time before the effect was evident here. You can see the before and after and even though the ridges are still visible on the smoother one, it’s definitely a different surface finish. There may be some instances where you want it and some you don’t, but this is just another tool to add to your toolbox. You .
