Small Scale Military Headquarters

I´m in work with a 3D-shapeways Nebelwerfer and would like to ask what cleaning procedure needs to be done before painting this thing?
Thanks in advance for tips and tricks

Crazy Kraut wrote:I´m in work with a 3D-shapeways Nebelwerfer and would like to ask what cleaning procedure needs to be done before painting this thing?
Thanks in advance for tips and tricks

Hi Crazy, do you know what material it was printed with? If it was WSF, White Strong and Flexible, typically the steps are:

- blow it clean with an air brush to get rid of any extra printing material
- apply basic primer (like any plastic model), WSF absorbs paint so this is important
- then use standard acrylics (Tamiya, etc..) for the rest

If you have stepping on the model from a low print quality, or low model quality, using multiple layers of primer can eliminate or significantly reduce this effect.

Using this approach, my nebels turned out ok.



Some members have painted them as well like this one:

by gliderdwm

Thanks for the info. It is printed in White strong & flexible.
Somewhere, somebody said that the printed parts need to be washed before use the basic primer. If this is not necessary fine for me
Will apply the primer and maybe paint this weekend.
With that it comes up a new unique custom model. Will tell more soon
thanks again

Yes, some parts especially if they were printed from a liquid resin come out with an oily coating that needs to be washed off. WSF is printed using SLS where lasers superheat tiny grains of plastic sand. That's where the white powder comes from that usually arrives with a WSF model. Shapeways does a pretty good job in most cases blowing it all off with compressed air. For enclosed parts like gun barrels, breeches, etc. I sometimes have to use a tiny screwdriver to get the powder out. Airbrush nozzle cleaning brushes work well too and act like pipe cleaners. You can also use brushes like that to scrape off any WSF that might be dug into small cracks, lines or around bolt heads.

That WSF material is really easy to work with like Grunt says... Cleans up nice. Washing things (models, etc.) usually is because of finger grease and such, but also because of mold-release materials like Grunt mentioned on resin. It's also on some injection molded models. I don't believe mold-release is an issue on a 3D print as it only is released from the platform it's printed on.

Handling anything though, oils from your hands need cleaned off for good paint adhesion.

On 3D Prints I use a nice self-etching green primer from Duplicolor found at Advance Auto... They also sell an "adhesion promoter" which is perfectly clear but works phenomenally on any material I've tried thus far with it. I like that green primer for 3D prints though as Grunt said, it's not that it's so thick (works on any model well) but it did hide some print lines for me I found.

Could also try a "sandable" automotive primer as they tend to be a TAD thicker. And their colors can really work out for base colors/primers you maybe want to expose too with chipping.