(intro [music from duck hunt game]) pokemon, gotta catch em' all! or in this case, we could just, uh, print them out, paint them, and um, save ourselves the hassle. so, hey guys, this is jerry a.k.a barnacules, and i've got a video for you! obviously we're going to make a pokeball from pokemon. and i picked up this model you see right here from thingiverse, so we're going to go ahead and get this thing fired off the printer, and finish it up. all right guys, we copied everything over to the sd card and now we've got the printer going to town here, and i'm doing something a little different this time. i'm doing something called a batch build.
notice how it completely finished printing the button before it moved on to the next item? this is a mode you can do on the printer where it will print each part individually, but it places them on the bed in such a way the head won't interfere. so it can print another piece and then move to a completely different piece. and raise the bed and start over. and i haven't done this before, but it does actually speed up your prints, because when it has to do each layer of the entire bed, for each item, the head has to move around a lot more than just finishing one item and then moving to the next one.
so this actually increased the print speed dramatically. you can't do this, obviously, with all projects; it just depends. but, in this case, it actually did work out. and it was able to place the items in such a way that it could do it. and so right now it's finished printing the middle section you can see there, and the button, and it's just finishing with one of the two hemispheres, in the back there. sorry, the camera angle wasn't ideal for this print. but it actually went pretty fast. i think the total print time was about an hour.
and here we are on the final dome. you can see it's printing with no support. it's -- even with the archway, in the hemispheres, it still just prints with no support, and it works just great. and unfortunately, i had to put my stock fan back on because i had a little mishap where i melted the one that i put on there because it wasn't secured very good. but i'm going to go ahead and print another one out and put it on there when i have more time. so here we go. you can see i'm not printing on the highest resolution, either. i'm printing it at .2 millimeter right here. so. and there you have it.
all right, now it's time to put some primer on these pieces. so i just went out in my garage and found a little piece of styrofoam laying around that i've used for some other painting. and i just layed the parts down, now i'm just spraying them with some primer that i picked up. so, this i had to do quite a few coats. this primer, i didn't want to put it on very thick, and a lot of people have been telling me that the key to painting is to do light coats. and i let it get away from myself here a little bit when i do the painting. but at least with the primer,
i did pretty light coats and i kept coming back and doing it over and over again, to get good coverage. and i will tell you what: when i tried painting something without priming it first, even though i was using a paint that said it didn't need a primer, and the colors were just kind of lame, and you could see a little bit of translucency, and it took massive layers of paint. when you use primer like this, the colors pop like crazy.
so i'm not a painting expert, and i won't pretend to even know why that is, but definitely putting on a base coat makes all the difference in the world. and you can see i'm just about done here with my first base coat on these pieces. and i didn't bother painting the insides because i thought that that would be completely pointless. all right. i jumped the gun a little bit here and actually painted the three pieces. and unfortunately i didn't have the camera with me because it was like one o'clock in the morning and i was super tired. but you can see here -- this is after the first coat or two of paint that i put on the pieces. and i just wanted to get a little bit of video to just kind of show you where they're at.
but now they're different colors you can see just how easy this thing is to paint and put together. all right. here we have the paint that i used. i opted to use krylon fusion, and i got the three colors that i needed, and i also got some rust-oleum painters primer. that sets up really fast. so, the krylon fusion paint seems to work really well. i didn't have much luck with it when i was just trying to paint the piece directly, but when i added the primer into the mix it made all the difference in the world. and you can see these pieces are really popping now. and here's the crystal clear acrylic coating that i used to finish off the piece.
and you'll see that here in just a minute. all right. time to apply the lacquer coat. now, the one thing i notice with the lacquer is that it really makes the color pop and shine. it, like, changes the whole way that the item refracts light. you can see in this piece, the red is already pretty shiny. but when you apply the lacquer to it, it actually gets, like, a mirror finish. and it stays looking wet, which is really cool. like you look at it there when it's dry--it'll look just like that. and you can see the middle piece there was kind of flat.
because it was the flat black that i painted it with. as soon as i was applying this it turned the black way more glossy. which is what you'd expect. now, the lacquer i applied about 3 or 4 coats about 12 minutes apart. and just to get complete coverage on all the parts and be able to flip them around and stuff like that. which i won't show in the video. but it made a huge difference. and the other thing that you'll notice, too, is that if you just paint the pieces, if you rub the paint with your finger,
even after it's cured for like 2 or 3 days, it'll kind of get a flat look to it. it'll kind of rub the paint off a little bit and change the texture of it. well, when you add the acrylic clear coat, it sets up. it's rock hard. so you can rub the item on anything and it doesn't wear off and nothing touches the paint. so it seals the paint in. and, y'know, just like a clear coat that you'd put on your car. it's like -- it's like the same difference.
it's designed to protect the paint. so now the piece is actually useable. and i can, y'know, put it in my pocket, or walk around with it and stuff and i don't have to worry about the paint getting scratched off. also, to speed the process along, i pulled out my little patent heater, because it was kind of cold out in the garage. and i just set it up close to the painting just to help set the paint up and cure everything. and it actually helped a lot. all right. after a few hours, the parts were ready to handle, so i picked them up,
and you can see they're completely dry right now. and look at that mirror finish! you can see every detail--the light on the ceiling. it's absolutely amazing. now had i printed this on the printer's highest resolution, you wouldn't have seen any lines or imperfections in the plastic. but even so, i was printing on .2 millimeter, which is less than half the resolution the printer supports. and once you've painted and lacquered it, it looks simply amazing.
and then you can see, to put it together you just fit the two halves together. you can see i already pre-pressed the button in before i did the lacquer job. just to make things easier. and when you push the two pieces together, you have a pokeball! well, a slightly retarded pokeball, but you'll see, i'll get it worked out. all right, so here we are back in the man cave with the finished product. you can see what it looks like under light in the room. i mean, it is incredibly shiny. and so now we're going to go ahead and put the thing together.
i'm just going to pressure fit it. i'm not going to bother gluing it right now. because it actually stays together pretty good on its own. so the first thing you want to do is take the bottom hemisphere, and then you just put the middle piece in it. and you just get it lined up as best you can. and press it in there, and the lacquer also helps hold it in place. and then i took these two nuts here, and i'm going to use them as weights. i drop them into the bottom. this way, if i set it on a table, it's not going to roll away. and then i put the top piece on it. and i have to fidget with it a little bit. you want to get the line so it's, like, y'know, pretty perfect all the way around.
so it does take a little bit of fidgeting. but once you press the two hemispheres together, with a little bit of pressure they stay put really, really well. and the lacquer acts almost like a glue. see, i don't have the gap quite right there so i need to fix it. but there you go! you have a pokeball! it's shiny, it's like a rattle, and now when you set it on the table, in theory, it stays put.
pretty cool, huh? [singing] here's an up close shot so you can get a little bit of a better look at it, and i'll twirl it around. and i've still got the little counterbalance weights inside of it, which work really, really well. and i figured i wouldn't glue it up because i might want to put other things in there. i mean, it's kind of a cool little container. well, guys, there you have it. pokemon ball, or pokeball. or whatever. you know i ain't gonna get it right.
anyway, turned out awesome. um, what more can i say? it's very shiny. [rattling noises] [singing] pokemon, gotta catch 'em all! [singing] oh pokemon, yeah! [singing] catch 'em, because they're pokemon! [singing] pokeball!
things to print on 3d printer,[sound effect] pika pika!
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