As anyone who has used an FDM printer can tell you, it’s certainly not the magical replicator it’s often made out to be. The limitations of the platform are numerous — ranging from anisotropic material characteristics to visual imperfections in the parts. In an attempt to reduce the visual artifacts in 3D prints, [TenTech] affixed a small diode laser on a 3D printer.
Getting the 1.5 watt diode laser onto the printer was a simple matter of a bracket and attaching it to the control board as a fan. Tuning the actual application of the laser proved a little more challenging. While the layer lines did get smoothed, it also discolored the pink filament making the results somewhat unusable. Darker colored filaments seem to not have this issue and a dark blue is used for the rest of the video.
The smoothing process begins at the end of a 3D print and uses non-planar printer movements to keep the laser at an ideal focusing distance. The results proved rather effective, giving a noticeably smoother and shiner quality than an unprocessed print. The smoothing works incredibly well on fine geometry which would be difficult or impossible to smooth out via traditional mechanical means. Some detail was lost with sharp corners getting rounded, but not nearly as much as [TenTech] feared.
For a final test, [TenTech] made two candle molds, one smoothed and one processed. The quality difference between the two resulting candles was minimal, with the smoothed one being perhaps even a little worse. However, a large amount of wax leaked into the 3D print infill in the unprocessed mold, with the processed mold showing no signs of leaking.
If you are looking for a bit safer of a 3D print post-processing technique, make sure to check out [Donal Papp]’s UV resin smoothing experiments!
Thanks [john] for the tip!
This dude is my favourite youtuber right now. Pushes interesting concepts at an unbelievable fast rate. One of the few 3D printing youtubers who puts in the work for original stuff. But I have to say, this one seems a bit unsafe for my liking xD
Yeah, it’s a cool project but I definitely appreciate the no-joke safety warning early in the video.
1.5w is more than enough to permanently fry nearby retinas (and even not-so-nearby retinas; IIRC, at that power there’s still risk of permanent eye damage more than a hundred meters away).
The good thing is the risk is quite manageable for a competent hobbyist (wear proper laser eye protection, never leave a running laser unsupervised, have an appropriate fire extinguisher handy, and ensure no other people or pets can accidentally enter the space.. did I miss anything?)
… but for more than an experimental build, I’d personally want a blue-laser-blocking box around the whole thing. A lot of the cheap laser engraver manufacturers (including creality) sell pre-assembled ones for pretty cheap ($50-60), though many of them are too short for a 3d printer. Sheets of laser-blocking acrylic aren’t too expensive either.
A box is much more foolproof eye protection since it shields everything and everyone in the room, but still not a magic bullet – acrylic will temporarily block the laser, but only until it melts and catches on fire (ask me how i know!)
Super cool. This looks better than ironing IMO. Maybe we can use lasers for inter-layer adhesion next.
that is actually a really interesting idea, reaheating the surface of the previous layer just before the new one is put in place
On lasers and 3D printing… Wasn’t there a company that tried a hybrid of FDM and resin printing ? The concept was to feed liquid UV resin down a tube ala an FDM type head but then cure it in place with a UV laser. I’m semi-sure I read about it here at HaD some years ago. Obviously must not have worked out as well as dreamt.
You’re probably thinking of Jón Schone ([Proper Printing] on youtube, regularly featured on hackaday).
He experimented with this a few years ago and got it to work.. but not easily. I’m not sure if he’s still trying to improve the process behind the scenes or not.
There’s also a commercial 3D printing company (Massivit) that appears to do something similar.
Seems handy for some very specific use cases. One being if you want the precision, dimensional stability, and high layer-bonding strength of a resin printer, but at a much larger build scale. Another being the use of the resin as a precise binder for more complex composite materials.
For most everything else, though, it just combines the drawbacks of both methods.
3D printing as it is, without any post processing, works great for me since almost all of the things I make are utilitarian … things I need but can’t readily buy. But I understand that a smooth surface is desirable for lots of other uses, and it’s cool to see people coming up with clever ways to accomplish that.