Vapor chamber or vapor finishing?

Has anyone post finished a Form SLA part in a vapor chamber? I’ve been told SLA parts cannot be vapor finished, but maybe someone out there has had success with it.

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Chemicals that act over the surface of Photopolymer will break, degrade, modify them. You can apply a coating but not a chemical process as far as I know.

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It doesn’t work I’ve played with a few parts and it just makes it brittle you could buy a cheap clear resin and do the dip finish trick but it can change the dimensions of the parts

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Hey all,

We actually have a few resources on Vapor Smoothing and did research together with AMT to see impact on vapor smoothing with Nylon 12 Powder, Nylon 11 Powder, TPU 90A Powder, Nylon 11 CF Powder, and Nylon 12 GF Powder.

Check out this overivew: Guide to Vapor Smoothing for SLS 3D Printing | Formlabs

and the White Paper: A Guide to Vapor Smoothing by Formlabs + AMT for more technical details.

A few details in the white paper:



hope this helps!

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Sorry! Just re-read to realize you’re talking about SLA:melting_face:

We don’t recommend SLA parts to be vaporsmoothed per @MattRForerunner 's + @Mario_Martinez 's comments. SLS is the tech that is best fit for it.

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To be a bit more helpful, here : ) - what type of finish are you looking to get @brownsabre700?

Here are some SLA polishing and sanding techniques that might suffice, depending what you’re looking for:

I like this video too from this year’s User Summit w/ our specialist Brigid who covers dying, electroplating and polishing SLA parts (plus a PreForm/post-processing masterclass with @leonhart88 !)

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As others have said, doesn’t work with SLA parts, only with real thermoplastics.

I have heard that vapor blasting/honing works well to polish SLA parts however…but that’s a different technique :upside_down_face: