ColorFabb Bronze and Copper Fill

Hi Everyone,
I’m wondering if any of you can offer some information on smoothing and bringing the best finish out using ColorFabb Bronze and Copper Fill. I AM using the Lulzbot Mini to print some fairly detailed prints that I want to look beautiful.

If you also have any specific printer settings when using these PLA metal filaments would be great.

What are the best PLA Metal Filaments for making your parts look like real metal?

Best Regards

I have successfully used a rock tumbler to get a pretty decent ‘rough’ finish but everything I have read on this basically states you finish it like real metal-where I started (3d printing is new, making things by hand is not to me). Anyway, that means starting with the rock tumbler (I had to put my piece in for about 30 hours) then sanding moving to finer grits of sand paper. Then likely polishing with polishing wheel and rouge on a dremel. I am only in the process of figuring this stuff out as the small things I am printing are just test pieces-I am making crowns so much larger size. I intend to use the dremel to do the part being done by the rock tumbler assuming my own tests are successful. Unfortunately I don’t have a full test to offer yet as I have another project fighting me so the tests with bronze fill are on hold. One VERY important thing, the bronzefill craps the HECK out of your hot end so be sure to use cold pulls to clean it out! I didn’t do a good enough job and spent 2 days cleaning my print nozzle as a result. I am still having issues though the cold pulls are clean and am wondering if the metal filaments have scratched the inside of the print nozzle…if anyone has any thoughts on how to figure out if that is the case, I would welcome them!

If you come up with any other magical solutions for shining the bronzefill, please share!

Here’s some finishing techniques from the Lulzbot tutorials.
https://www.lulzbot.com/learn/tutorials/polishing-your-metal-bearing-3d-prints

The Colorfabb site has Tips & Tricks on each of their filament pages including the metal bearing filaments.
http://colorfabb.com/bronzefill

Also, you should use a hardened nozzle when printing metal bearing filaments since they will cause massive wear on a brass nozzle very quickly.

I start with 800 grit sandpaper and work my way up to wet sanding with 1500 and 2000 grit paper to get a real shine.


You can use brasso to get a darker color. Read Colorfabb’s great writeup on working with bronzefill:

http://learn.colorfabb.com/print-bronzefill/