3D printed on a Prusa MK3S using PLA+/Silk PLA
this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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It is not the print bed side that you're seeing. It's also a fairly close up pic, and then I cropped out more. The lines aren't as prominent in person at arms length.
The print bed side is nice and smooth and looks better than this. I had a couple of minor issues getting this printed that also contributed to the top layers not looking their absolute best, but even if they did, you would still be seeing the print lines. There's not a lot that can be done about that. 3D printing is a prototyping technology, after all.
What I did here was to make the white rectangle the first color (Esun PLA+ Cool White), then at a certain layer height - I think 2mm - I unloaded the white filament, swapped to a blue silk filament and resumed the print. So all the blue you see is sitting on top of the white.
Some people have printers that can automatically swap between filaments, and therefore they can "paint" prints like this to be the full yellow, blue, white and black that you see elsewhere. Those can be expensive and hard to operate though, so I don't own one. I sure would like that capability though.
Oh, ok. I assumed that you printed the layers separately and then just glued them together, in which case I was wondering, why not have the printbed side outwards. But it makes sense for a whole piece.
Yeah, that's something you could do, but getting the individual parts all aligned properly and glued down would be a pain. I guess it would be possible to print a tool to make it easier, but that's certainly a lot more work.
Yeah, I can see how aligning small face pieces would be problematic. Although, how hard would it be to make small indents on the back piece that would perfectly fit the elements?
If you have the CAD files, not hard. That's most often not the case if you downloaded the model from a site like printables.com or thingiverse.com, as I did with this model.
Some slicer programs might let you do that too, but probably not as easily or as well as CAD software.
Thank you very much for all your detailed answers!
Well you know it's very hard to get 3D printing enthusiasts to talk about 3D printing.