This episode of Bluey is called "Visor Time."
I recently got an Elegoo Saturn 4 Ultra resin printer, so the natural thing to do was to start printing my visors out of resin. This whole ordeal was a big learning experience for me, a tale rife with elation, frustration, regret, stress eating Digiorno's, and triumph.
Much of the process I learned from
this tutorial by dat_boi_builds, so my description of the process will likely reiterate many of his talking points. His video is incredibly helpful and easy to follow.
Printing the visors was the easy part, for which I used FUNCRECOL clear yellow resin. After going through the washing and curing procedure, I removed the supports as carefully as I could and began sanding them down. I started wet sanding at 120 grit (resin quickly clogs up the sand paper) to knock down all the support scars and any unevenness, and gradually worked my way up to 3000 grit. He does mention in the tutorial that past 3000 grit you get diminishing returns, and I can confirm that. This is the process that demanded most of my time, especially at the lower grits.
The jump from 600 to 800 grit is pretty significant in terms of clarity and that's where you really start to see a difference. While wet, the water mimics a clear coat so it's a good gauge for how clear the visor is after sanding and polishing.
After a thorough cleaning to get rid of any oils, the visors get their clear coat. I used
2K Spray Max, which is a two-part aerosol clear coat. Once this stuff gets mixed, it's got a pretty limited shelf life (48 hours, IIRC) so I opted to do five visors at once, one for each helmet I have printed. As per the linked tutorial, I did an initial fine mist coat, a slightly thicker second coat, then a final thick coat which I left to cure for a day, taking care not to lay it on too aggressively to avoid drips.
Of course, this is where I messed up big time. They turned out perfectly clear after drying, but I saw that the sides had some texture to them. I assumed it was just uneven application, so I thought I'd try to fix it with another coat. Big mistake. I should have left well enough alone.
The entire visor - all five of them, in fact - ended up with a pretty aggressive orange peel texture and were rendered unusable. Anything past a foot away is a mess. I took some advice from Discord and sanded the clear coat off and tried again, but no luck.
Then I had an idea. I threw a hail mary and laid down a second round of coats (2 mist coats, then a thick final coat) right over the orange peel. My thinking was that it would, at least, help thicken and level it out some.
And that worked.
It's not quite as glass-like as my first attempt, but the visibility is good enough that I can read text, which I couldn't even do with my failed attempts. Hopefully I can get the same result with the other four visors I have printed.
