 This is a 100% fully 3D printed sign. In this video I'm gonna show you how I made it, what materials you need to make it, and how much it cost me from start to finish. Right before we start the video, if you enjoy these type of builds, do me a favor and watch until the end so that YouTube algorithm knows to recommend it to more people. If you wanna see more stuff like this, subscribe to the channel to see more. So I wanna make a gift for this local motorcycle shop that I visit often in the summer. They built all kinds of crazy bikes and they let me come in and watch them on the dyno. Teach me new things and occasionally helped me and my friends out with our normal bikes. So I thought it would be cool to make them something nice for the shop. And since my skills are pretty much limited to either breaking bikes or 3D printing, I went with the 3D printing. I was able to get my hands on their company logo and I was thinking maybe we could take this 2D logo and turn it into something 3D using 3D printing. To turn this image from 2D to 3D is usually a very simple task. You take the picture, you turn it to black and white and then you either remove black, you remove white and you're left with the logo or at least with an outline. In this case, it doesn't work very well because we have all this artifacts and different lines and different things at the back that really have nothing to do with the core logo. So because that wasn't an option, I had to sit here and actually manually draw out every letter and every detail that I wanted to keep and move out into a sketch which is what I came up with right over here. The company is called Roy Performance so I kept the R and the P, I kept the line bar on the top here and then I did the circle and I added a little engine cover, engine case over here which you could see in the main image. I just made it a lot smaller because this is way too big. So then we have this 2D sketch that you could see like this. It's just a flat piece of line over here but then with a little bit of magic, you can turn it into a 3D part like that. And once I had this, I started having an idea of what it would look like and how it would have to do it. First thing was splitting it up into different pieces because my printer could not print something this big in one piece. Then I figured I would want to have it just big blocks 3D print because that would cost hundreds of dollars in ink so I emptied them out and made them kind of these shallowed, empty out letters. Then the next step was to split up the parts on more lines so I have one right here. Then I split up the circle and the engine case into two different parts and I added a bevel on all the parts, this little lip over right here so that we can print a case and put that case on top and then the letters would all be emptied out. The reason I wanted to empty them out is so we could put things inside of them like LEDs or like any kind of moving components. Then in the last iteration right here I made my little caps or whatever you want to call it my little covers which are just thin pieces that are going to clip into the main pieces right over here. We're going to do this in black I think and this in white to have a nice contrast. And I took the letters from the sign from the original logo up here. Now that we have a general idea of what we're doing we need to get our materials so we can get started with the printing which is going to take forever because this thing is going to be huge. When it came to the 3D printing I had an important decision to make that would decide the fate of the project. Either I could go with the typical FDM printing that everyone is used to or I can go with SLA resin printing. I'm not going to make a 30 minute video on why one is better than the other or the differences pros and cons all that. I'm just going to bring it down to the fact that this option would be quick and easy whereas this option would be difficult and slow but as a viewer I will let you make the decision on what will look better for a 3D printed sign either this one right here with all the markings and the lines and the plastic look or this one that looks like a piece of glass. Since I didn't have any timeframe or any kind of restrictions I ended up going with the SLA resin printing. SLA resin printing is a 3D printing technology that works by having this special liquid called a resin that turns solid when it's exposed to UV light. So imagine you have a pool of this liquid and then you have a machine with a laser and when the laser points to a certain part that part solidifies and by doing that over and over and over we can make all kinds of crazy shapes and sizes like this letter R right here. The one thing that made me want to go with the resin printing versus FDM printing is that resin printing can go up to at least with my printer 4K resolution which means I can get super fine details with this comparing to this. This will definitely have marks and things that are out of my control. Like this is probably the cleanest piece I've had in a while and as you could see there's a massive marking here where the printer head moves back and forth and it's very difficult to get rid of this. So SLA printer it is. For the 3D printing materials I had to order three of these smokey black ABS like polymer resin and one white polymer resin. Both the white and the black cost about the same. It came out to about 50 bucks a bottle and I had to order three of these. One of these that's about $200 in materials just to get started with the printing but there definitely will be some leftover. Then I just came down to sending the files to the printer and getting to work. Because we're trying to make this sign big I tried to make every piece as big as possible that I could fit in my printer. Because of that as you can guess printing time got pretty crazy. For each piece that I showed you earlier the average print time was somewhere around 20 hours. So for the six main pieces that's around 120 hours. I think it might even be more. Then we had to print all the covers and all the letters. Those took between four and 15 hours each. So in total we were at about or maybe even over 150 hours of printing. For reference it's almost a week of non-stop printing but obviously that's not how it works. You got to take things off, clean them up and then start the next one. Now I'm no professional when it comes to SLA resin printing. So as you can see I did have faults. I did have issues. I did have failed prints. Things that I didn't consider into the time of how long it took to do this. But that at the end of the day is just human error and that's on me to get better at doing this thing. A great example of this is I actually had the tub of liquid. I had a pierced hole in the bottom and it was leaking out on top of the screen that the laser comes through. And then the laser was solidifying the resin on top of the screen instead of in the tub. So when I went to remove my print I just had the print on the main screen and there's nothing I could do about it because it was hardened. So I had to replace that which was about 150 bucks and a month of waiting for a new screen. While all the parts were printing I wanted to figure out a way to mount this sign on the wall and make it super easy for the people that I'm giving it to as a gift. Since they're mechanics I didn't think it would be a fun gift to give them something that has to be assembled and put together since that's their job full time. It's kind of ironic it's like giving a kid homework as a present for finishing his homework. So I was thinking maybe we could take a piece of plexiglass, cut it up nice and put all the letters on that and then when they wanna put it on their wall if they do they take the plexiglass and just put that on the wall like a painting. Thankfully for me I have a lot of things laying around so I had a bunch of plexiglass laying around. I think I had 14 inches wide and 18 inches wide. I tried them both out. I went with the 14 inches and we prepped it to get cut. The nice thing about cutting the plexiglass in this case was super easy. You just put the letters on it, you mark a line and then I took it outside and I cut it. I use these blades right here. They're Bosch, T-Shank fits all blades. They're meant for wood but they're fine teeth which is perfect for plexiglass. And then these obviously went in a jigsaw and I just cut it up quick. Went pretty smooth. The only annoying part was that I was trying to cut it precisely and not crack it. And doing that outside in the negative 15 degrees was not too easy. To make sure that I didn't crack it I used a bench and I just clamped it down super tight to the bench and then I used something on the other side to keep it stable and I just went right through the middle where I marked the line. After that you can see I lined it up and everything was ready to go, ready to get glued. In my case since the plexiglass was just there it was free but if you don't have some laying around you can find something like this for about 50 bucks. This was like a door off a closet or something and I just chopped it in half and boom it works perfectly. I think now we're about $250 for all the materials. Maybe $10 more for these blades but I'm gonna use them for other things so I don't really wanna count that. Now as you can see, dump this. Most of the prints are finished. I started with just cleaning up the prints so I had to remove the supports, sand them down and kinda make everything even. The problem with the prints being multiple pieces and all sorts of issues I had with printing is that the lines were not even and some things didn't fit as nicely as I wanted them to. But that's why you always over print. So for example, this cover right here, this letter R didn't fit very well so I sanded it down, tested it, sanded it down, tested it until it had that perfect click when you put it in. You don't need any glue, it should fit perfectly. I just repeated that process for every single piece that I printed and made sure that everything was good enough that at least from a couple feet away you would never be able to see the markings and the issues on them. I made sure to also sand the back of all the main pieces with a super coarse sandpaper to make sure that the glue was good and sticky on those. And then I went, put them on the plexiglass, traced that and repeated the same process for the plexiglass to make sure that it also had a good adhesion to the glue. So when the part was super glued to the plexiglass it would never come off. And I can guarantee you after gluing it, it's not coming off. Also for the letter P which split into four pieces I had to glue that thing together and then clean up the lines between the letters that kinda looked ugly with all that like leftover super glue. So I took those, glued them together and then really cleaned up those lines. This super glue cost me about 15 bucks on Amazon and it came with two bottles. It's honestly probably the strongest stuff I've ever used. The only thing I would recommend is get one that's a little bit more like a little bit more thicker viscosity as you can see this one's a thin viscosity. So this one's really liquid. It gets all over your hands. Your hands start to feel like plastic. I had fingers glued together. Like it was a mess. I would definitely get one that's a little bit thicker a little bit more like a like a paste maybe kind of like an epoxy, but this thing is crazy strong. So now we're at about $265 in full materials up to this point. Then once we had our letters glued to our Plexiglas as you can see right here, these things are not coming off. I mean, I could pick it up just by the letters. So once that was done, we had to install the LEDs as you can see right now. Something so simple as gluing LEDs to the resin print became a really complicated task. At first I was gonna use the super concentrated WS2812B addressable LEDs. This is a really complicated way of saying super compact LEDs that are super bright and that you can control individually. So if you have 300 LEDs, I can control zero to 300 each one by itself. That's where the word addressable comes from. It's not exactly the same type of LEDs that you'd put in your 14 year old's room that flashes on blue or red or whatever it is. But unfortunately after installing half of those LEDs something went wrong, the LED burnt and the controller burnt. So those had to get thrown out. Luckily for me, I had a couple of these laying around. This is also addressable LEDs, but these are split apart about an inch each, which is a little bit more long than I wanted, but it is what it is. You gotta make with what you have. Unfortunately at this point, I don't have the time to start ordering LEDs that are gonna come in two months time. So we use these, we made it work. The process to make the LEDs work was literally just starting from the bottom right here, wiring in, going all the way around the perimeter, all the way to the top, and then looping back around. That took me about two hours and a half to get my fingers in there and pushed the LEDs through. I definitely should have made those holes bigger. And then I had a bunch of LEDs left over. So I thought why not run through it again, do a couple loops in the middle, send some more out here and just kind of make it. So I'm using all the LED that I have because I don't have as many LEDs here and because they're not as bright, I wanted to pack as much as I can to make the sign really pop out. And I want to try and avoid the look of LEDs. I wanted to kind of have a nice, flush white color. I then connected up some super thin and small, addressable LED controllers which just plug into a power supply and the power supply obviously goes into a wall outlet. Super simple and clean and seamless. Here's what the LEDs look like without the cover on. Just plug it in over here, maybe I'll unplug the light. It's not too bad, honestly. Seeing it in person, it makes quite a difference. This is without the covers on. And you can kind of see what I mean by the LEDs being spaced out so much that you kind of have these little black spots in between them. I'm hoping with the covers on, those will get blended in. So I was to actually just, you can see how now it's a uniform white versus here, you kind of have like little blind spots from the LEDs. When you cover it up, they kind of blend in together. So I'm hoping that comes out nice. Also the LED controller, I have no idea how to use it but when you click it, it does all kinds of crazy things like change brightness, has like Christmas modes, all kinds of crazy things that they can play with when the things actually installed. Personally though, my favorite is definitely just going with the plain white, wherever it is. I think it was here. And then just full brightness works great. So right now with LEDs, with the controller and with the power supply, we're at around $300 with some extra parts for the next project. Now we're coming up on the final parts of this build. I have a couple more parts I want to clean. I want to sand down maybe a little bit of gluing. And I'm gonna do that with you guys right now so you can see how the final touches kind of come in together to make this look like a really nice project. Move this over for now. The first thing I wanted to do was give these covers a nice cleaning with some alcohol. The panel is already pretty much just prepped as it needs to be. Everything inside is messy, but it's okay because we're gonna be covering it up. So I guess we could just get started with installing all the parts. Now check this out. It barely fits, but if I put a little bit of pressure, you can hear it clicking in. Perfect, so we have this installed, this installed, this installed. That one. We're gonna use this one at the end because what I would like to do is put it like that. Like that maybe. And put the letters on it all nice and tight on the top. That's done. Those are not moving. They're locked in place. I think I did a pretty good job of lining it up in the middle. Okay, now we gotta do the harder part, which is gonna be to put all the letters on this. We don't need the sign for that, so I'm just gonna take this away for now. The O looks funky, but honestly, I don't think from a distance it's gonna make that much of a difference. Gonna give this another minute or two to dry. Then we're gonna sand this nice and clean. And then this will be ready to install on the sign. While that dries, I actually have a little special thing I wanted to add to the sign to kind of liven it up a bit. At first I wanted to do this with a motor, but I realized that would be way too complicated. So I decided to just go with the basic gear and chain set up for the sign. We got letters installed. We got caps installed. Everything's good to go. Let's make sure the LEDs still work so we don't deliver unfinished product, I can say. I'm not sure if I mentioned it before, but the gear and the sprockets cost me about 25 bucks. So we gotta consider that into the cost of the whole project. For the total cost breakdown of this project, I think we were saying the resin was four bottles at $50 each. So that's $200. The Plexiglas would cost you around $50. The glue was $15. The LED and controllers was $35. The chain and gears were another $25. So in total, this project should have cost you around $325 to do it the way I did it. With one thing that we need to consider with a lot of materials leftover for the next one. I think I can cut about $100 out of this project or sorry, out of the next project just by reusing the stuff from this one. So if I was to remake this the same exact way, I do think I'd be about $200, $225 for the next one. Well, look at this. It's all starting to come together. And I think this is where I'm gonna leave it as the final project. We got nice logo. We got the full lettering. We got a moving kind of gear part, fully controllable LEDs with their own controller and a full working power supply. And all that in one piece on Plexi that I can move around super easily. And man, this thing is tough. I'm really happy with how it came out and I really hope they enjoyed. So let's hit it up with that mineral oil and let's get the final shots for the video. If you do enjoy this video, do me a favor and subscribe to the channel so you can get notified when I put more of these out. And if you have any comments or anything you wanna see in future videos, please do let me know in the comments. It's a nice little change from electronic stuff. Anyways, let's hit it up with that oil and I'll see you in the next one.