Most important thing is prep beforehand and many thin coats. The more sanding you do up front the less you will have to do later.
Basically the whole process went like this:
- Fill bottom support interface with black nail polish
- Sand everything to the best of my abilities using ~150 grit
- Coat with filler primer, many coats until all gouges/imperfections are filled (you can sand between coats here)
- Sand again using finer and finer grit (I went 200, 500, steel wool)
- Important if any 3D print is still showing put more coats of primer until you can’t see any plastic. Otherwise you will get different colors showing through the paint. (Sand lightly after doing this step)
- Spray with color of choice (Krylon satin florescent pink and satin black for me)
- Spray with enamel to protect coats (Krylon satin clear)
- Don’t fucking touch it for like 2 days or you will put fingerprints on it and have to put another coat.
- Done!
There are some things I would have changed, mostly just masking off the inside of the button holes so that I didn’t have to sand them after the fact and then chip off some of the paint on accident…
It was super rewarding seeing a prototype-looking 3D print become something that looks like it was injection molded though!