The dome - 2

After printing and gluing all the dome pieces it cames the tedious part. You need to remove the 3D printing artifacts and the defects to make the parts as smooth as possible and this could be a long lasting task...

First of all you need to make a coarse sanding preferably using a mouse sander as this is the heaviest part.

After most of the artifacts have been removed some of the biggest defects will probably need some putty to be fixed.

After the putty dried out it must be sanded. Now you can use finer grain for the sanding going from the 80 grit of the first one up to 240 or more at the end, to get e perfectly smooth surface.

When you are happy with the surface, it's time to think about the smaller defects. Too small to use the putty, but that can be still visible under certain light conditions.

For this you just need a good spray filler like the ones used for cars painting. After a couple of coverings you can look at your pieces and if you are non completely satisfied you can do some light sanding and repeat the filler coatings another 2-3 times.

This is my dome after the first two filler coatings:

Far better than the photos in the first dome post! After some more sanding/filler/sanding/filler and so on, I came to this result:

I also applied a first coating for the blue pieces and the alluminum coating on the holoprojector. The pieces are still not glued as I will need to paint the dome using the same alluminum used for the projector and before the gluing I also wish to apply a protecting coating.