SLS and MJF nylon comes off the machine matte and slightly porous. Finishing is the second step that turns that raw print into a sealed, coloured, or hardware-ready part — vapor smoothing, dyeing, sanding, and threaded inserts, applied to what our SLS and MJF lines already produce.
SLS and MJF nylon parts come off the machine with a visibly grainy, slightly porous surface — a side effect of building from fused powder. Vapor smoothing exposes the part to a chemical vapor that briefly melts the outermost layer of material, which then re-solidifies into a smooth, continuous skin.
The grainy, powder-built texture is replaced by a smooth, closed surface — visually closer to an injection-moulded part than a printed one.
Useful when a part needs to look presentable straight away, or where a closed surface reduces the porosity that raw SLS/MJF parts otherwise have — for example where a part will hold a fluid or needs to resist surface contamination.
We don't publish specific before/after roughness numbers or a guaranteed finish grade here — ask our engineers what vapor smoothing will realistically do for your specific part and material at quote.
Raw SLS and MJF nylon prints in natural grey or off-white. Dyeing takes that raw part and immerses it in a coloured dye bath, so the part comes out a uniform solid colour rather than staying grey or needing a painted coat.
A quick way to move a part off natural grey to a solid colour, without the cost or fragility of a painted finish.
Dyeing gives one solid colour per part. For gradients, multi-colour detail, or printed graphics in a single build, that's PolyJet, not dyeing.
Hand or machine sanding smooths specific surfaces or edges on a part — useful for a part that needs one particular face refined without vapor-smoothing the whole model, or for cleaning up support-contact points and parting lines.
Printed nylon threads wear out fast under repeated fastening. Heat-set or press-fit threaded metal inserts give a printed part a real, durable threaded connection for screws and fasteners — common on enclosures, brackets, and any part that gets assembled and disassembled more than once.
These photographs were taken on our production floor in Dongguan, the same floor that runs our SLS, MJF, and PolyJet lines. As noted above, we do not yet have a genuine before/after vapor-smoothing photograph to show — sample photography is being arranged rather than substituted.
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