My experience has been that a great deal of sanding and other tool use can be needed to get to smooth results.
Did you go through a finishing process after printing to get to the smooth results you show here?
Many modern printers also give similar results, but may require a bit of tuning. Also it's as much about the settings in your slicer software, and most current ones have evolved to have great defaults and are easily tweaked.
The top SEO’d buyers guide websites are pretty useless in my experience.
That said, having owned a dozen different printers for my own business’s prototyping work, the Bambu labs are truly fantastic. I retired 3 ultimaker S7s for 2 X1 Carbons and haven’t looked back. The Bambu labs legitimately print 3-4x faster and have as good if not better surface finish. AMS system is ingenious. Only thing I did was x-y squareness/skew compensation so both printers make the same sized parts (the printers aren’t perfectly square from the factory). There are guides on how to use M1005 gcode command.
If your hobby is 3D printing, get a Bambu. If it's 3D printers, get anything else.
If you're working with more exotic or engineering materials, it can still require a bit of work to dial in. But the most common like PLA, ABS, PETG will print without issue.
Bambu does all that and more for less money. Hard to beat.
The Prusa XL may still be worth it if you need that sort of thing.
On the other hand, continuing the bed slinger line let Prusa provide an upgrade path for existing printers.
- print quality and speed is similar (new MK4S seems to be a bit better)
- Bambu's design life is much shorter (Prusas are fully repairable with parts stocked in the online shop, and every new version release includes upgrade kits for old models)
- the amount of effort/babysitting is similar
- reliability seems higher on Prusa's side (no wonder, given that they print parts of the printer on the printers themselves on industrial scale)
Also, if this matters to you, Bambu behaviour (like patenting opensource designs they didn't invent [1] and hostile competitive intelligence [2]) seems quite problematic.
[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5134/8/6/141
[2]: https://twitter.com/josefprusa/status/1706713274455081120
Got an A1 mini in the recent sale and it's been so refreshing being able to just focus on what I actually want to do, which is printing stuff.
That's what sold me on getting my Bambu, and it's totally true. No need to spend hours carefully aligning and calibrating things.
The acetone (vapour) approach only works on ABS and is pretty nasty. For PLA your best bet is sanding. You could add some putty to make it a bit easier and get better results. You will then also need to paint it. All in all if the print quality is good enough best stick with that.
We don't sand any PLA, anymore. If we need to control the surface texture, it's largely a function of the qualities of the filament and print speed.
I'm mentioning it because we were surprised how easily our molds separated when we moved to Bambu and didn't understand why. It turned out that the combination of the layer height and high print speed that gave the prints their smooth, matte finish with standard PLA also made them functionally non-stick.
We also discovered they're also at least tough enough for a car to drive over, which may have just been because of the thickness. I also sometimes print nylon and polycarbonate automotive parts for a mechanic which seem to have excellent rigidity and durability.
As FDM printing evolves the number of use cases it cannot solve seems to be shrinking. Probably we need to get into physics requirements to cover the requirements that FDM does not solve these days. Which is great, it makes general plastics manufacturing super accessible to the masses when we can arrive at this. I wish there was a general FAQ thing available people would be able to use to determine what manufacturing process would be necessary at the product planning phase. Because I feel like if people knew that they could just 3D print plastics at scale that a lot more people would be willing to innovate in the hardware space, which is a space well known as being difficult to enter and fraught with all sorts of monetary and regulatory land mines.
We do most of our bulk purchasing through MatterHackers, but I buy my own filament through the Bambu store.
If you’re using a color that already has a decent amount of yellow in it or don’t mind the yellowing polyurethane and spar-urethane are also decent finishing options. They won’t work on colors like white though, obviously. Even grey is probably going to see a little too much yellowing from those.
Tbf medium-large sized prints you can see it's printed up real close but from arm's length at 0.12 height you can't really tell.
Only thing is terrible overhangs/bridges...I need to pick up an AMS already!
XTC is a good solution for some use cases, and quite bad for others, as outlined above. For the use case in the OP, probably it would be quite nice. That use case is one that is hobbyist level of output in terms of number of units generated but also one where aesthetics are quite important if not fundamental to the overall design. For this kind of use case XTC is a good fit.
The one other thing to consider, if you design to use stuff like XTC and even the urethanes I mention above, is that obviously it takes up some amount of space. So you have to factor that into the design. Probably what I would do is take my boundaries from the original design and increase the tolerance by maybe 1mm or so for the extra space the finishing agent will take up. Because I highly suspect that if you applied XTC to the dock in the OP that the phone would no longer fit after that due to the tight tolerances in the design without that adjustment.
Also, MEK, Methyl Ethyl Ketone, apparently smooths PLA out quite well too, but if you can print in ABS I would already be doing that for finished products anywho.
MEK is incredibly strong and useful, but it is also nasty stuff[0].
Please read the MSDS[1] and handle with appropriate PPE.
[0] https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...
[1] https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=M2094&produc...