Smoothing 3D Prints

Smoothing 3D Prints can be quite challenging depending on what material you are trying to smooth. Of course your 3D metal prints are considered the most challenging of all materials. However, when selecting the right abrasive in a vapor hone system you can accomplish smoothing the surface quite easily. The challenge most times is to determine whats smooth enough for the customer because we’ve seen this vary between accounts.

The main and most important way to determine what a customers expectations are for smoothing 3D prints is to run free trial processing on customer supplied parts. This helps us with media selection and recipe formulation to ensure accuracy for your repetable parts processing. We have found it best to work with a combination of medias to properly smooth a parts surface. The harder the substrate the harder blasting media we use to hammer and smooth the part surface.

In our smoothing 3D Prints video shown here you see metal prints being smoothed. This operation takes some time and manual intervention when doing a great job. Utilizing automation is one thing but cannot rival the manual human touch needed to properly process parts. If automation is something you think you might need then we can cover this at that point but I still like the process control of a manual machine. Normally when smoothing prints rolling edges or diminishing tolerances isn’t something to worry with since the flow based nature of the vapor hone helps roll the abrasives across the surface. This smoothing operation for metal prints isn’t something that’s quick you need to take time to hit all angles and properly roll out those larger peaks from printing.