The nozzle crashed into the print and tipped it over so I printed the top part separately and glued it there. Any tips how to hide the line where it’s glued on? It’s all PLA.
Am I the weird one who just would take a hot glue gun or 3d printing pen and heat it up and slowly just roll it across the edges until the plastic becomes soft enough to push together?
Maybe I’m just trashy enough to not care that it’s not the nicest looking afterwards.
If you can still separate the pieces: Take some big enough flat surface (has to be very flat) and cover it with sandpaper. Sand the pieces until they are completely flat. They will then connect without any gap in between.
This is the correct answer.
For anyone who wants an acceptably flat surface on a shoestring budget — or free — any piece of modern glass will do it. Even that out of a cheap picture frame. Modern float glass is extremely flat. Maybe not to optical lab grade standards, but certainly enough to render the gap between any two given objects small enough to fit on any piece of glass you’re likely to be able to lay your hands on straight enough that you couldn’t slip a piece of paper in between. Supply your own wet-or-dry sandpaper.
This is also useful for mirror-finishing the bottoms of heat sinks or the bevels on chisels.
Any surface that looks/feels flat will be good enough for this use case, no need to find a bit of glass. Most table tops will do. You might need something better for flattening heat sinks, but for 3d prints you don’t need to be that accurate. The plastic will deform far more under light pressure then the difference in any relatively flat surface you can find.
If you have one then there is no harm in using it - but also not need to explicitly look for something that flat. Any table will likely be good enough.
I generally agree with everyone else, but I need to ask if that is a tree topper, and if the files are available, my tree broke my printed Mario Star this year, and we will need a new star next year.
Yes, a tree topper indeed, it’s a paid model: https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/various/kirby-treetopper
Sweet, thanks!
I think you should have printed a cowboy hat and glued that on. I’ve seen people do it, and it hides the line very well 😆
I’m not sure if there is an easy fix if you want to continue. My prints often come with a slight warp underneath (from the bed). That leads to the exact same result as in your picture. Maybe that’s fixable on better printers. Or you’d need to print just the hollow outline that gets glued on. Not any middle part that could be warped slightly…
Or some postprocessing. Fill the gap with filler from the hardware store before painting. But that won’t be possible with multicolor prints.
It looks like the gap is a whole perimeter missing likely caused by the infill being printed first? Or something else inside stopping it from being flush on the outside. This might not help now (unless you can separate the parts without damaging the outer perimeter) but before gluing it up it would have been best to get some sandpaper on a flat surface and sand the whole top flat until you have one complete outer perimeter. Or cut away the infill so the outer perimeter is the highest point.
If you cannot separate them without damage to the outer perimeters then you have a few options. First you could deform the plastic near then seam to cover it up. This can be done by heating the seam up with a hot air gun or hair dryer and pressing the layers together to close up the gap. You would really want to be gentle with the heat, just enough to let it start plasticity deforming with moderate/light pressure but not enough so it deforms under its own weight. Too much heat will also start to melt the surface edges of the layers rounding them over and making them look shiny which can look very obvious as well. So you really need to take it slow and apply as little heat as you can until it is just soft enough to deform.
The other options are to fill the gap. This can be done with any old filler but requires lots of sanding and painting afterwards. Or you can try to fill it with more plastic. You can use your printer to print small lines to give you something the right shape to fill the gaps, then it is just a matter of gluing or melting it in place. Super glue/CA glue will not be a good option here as it tends to leave white smear on 3d prints if you get any over spill which is very likely with a small gap. There are some glues designed for PLA that don’t do this but I have never tried them myself. You could also heat the patch first until it can deform and press it in quickly though this can be tricky to do quickly enough before it cools and may not stick in well. There are also solvents you can get that dissolve the plastic and let it weld together, best way to use that is to dip the patch peace in it and press that into the gap trying to get as little on the print as you can - any spillage will start to dissolve the layer lines smoothing them over and making them look shiny.
Each of these does require some skill to do well and are easy to mess up making the print look worst - so i would try them out on some scraps first. Though you can always opt to use any filler and sand/paint the model after but that requires quite a bit of work to make it look good but is the only real option that you can keep going until it looks good.
Use Green Stuff Putty to fill the crack, smooth/sand it to be even, then put a good base coat over everything and paint it
Edit: typo
