Finishing - Smoothing WSF

This is my first finished part from Shapeways. I hoped that painting and Gloss coating the parts would smooth the surface out to an almost-styrene level of finish; it's close but.....

The full-size image is 4.5x larger than the actual part.

I tried sanding the ends with a coarse Flex-I-File Flex Pad sanding stick and got a nice smooth surface after a few passes. It would take a LONG time to do the sides of the coil hood with the sanding stick so I thought I'd try using my Dremel tool with a small grinding stone in it ( http://www.dremel.com/en-us/AttachmentsAndAccessories/Pages/ AttachmentsDetail.aspx?pid=85602 )

Full size image is 4.5x larger than the actual part.

It took about 40 minutes of sanding for each hood; you need a light touch with the Dremel tool (at the slowest speed setting) to keep from removing too much paint at once. I used a diamond-coated jeweler's file to gently sand the lifting bail on the top of the hood. Two or three passes usually was all it took to smooth out a surface.

And here they are installed in a car.

The hoods are for sale here:
https://www.shapeways.com/model/218561/coil_gon_hoods_20__2pk _ho.html?gid=ug69853

A photo of the real thing's here: https://www.rr-fallenflags.org/nkp/nkp134.jpg

I'm surprised to hear that you were able to do any sanding at all without the paint being damaged. Are you happy with the end result?

Overall I'm happy with the results. A very light touch at low speed is necessary with the Dremel tool! I'll give them one more light coat of paint and Glosscote, add decals and weather them to completely finish them off.

I put much more paint on the hoods than I normally do with models plus the paint really soaks into the porous surface of the WSF material. More than 50% of the paint came off the model - I sanded it right down to the WSF (the slightly lighter yellow patches in the photo are bare WSF saturated with paint). I used the paint and Glosscote like body filler - I was trying to fill in the gaps between the print layers and the pores in the surface and expected to remove some paint to get a smooth surface.

If I can find and purchase some I'm going to try automotive Self-Leveling Primer on the assembled ONR pulp flat ( https://www.shapeways.com/model/223793/onr_4500_4509_ho_10ft_ 10in_bulkhead_pulp_flat_r2.html?gid=ug69853 )and see if that smooths the surface enough to eliminate the need for sanding.