Post-Processing 3D Prints: Finishing Techniques and How to Charge for Them

The printer does maybe 80 percent of the job. The last 20 percent — finishing — is what customers actually judge, and it's where shops quietly lose money by giving away skilled labor for free. Here's a tour of the techniques and, more importantly, how to charge for them.

Finishing FDM prints

FDM parts come off the bed functional but raw. Common steps, roughly in order:

• Support removal — clip and peel away supports, then clean the scars. Fast on simple parts, fiddly on detailed ones.
• Sanding — wet-sand from coarse to fine grit to knock down layer lines. This is time-intensive and scales with surface area.
• Priming and painting — filler primer hides remaining lines; paint gives the final look. Multiple coats with dry time between.
• Smoothing — for some materials, controlled techniques can melt layer lines into a glossy finish. Powerful, but skill- and safety-dependent.

Finishing resin prints

Resin has a mandatory finishing pipeline before a part is even safe to handle:

• Wash — rinse uncured resin off in isopropyl alcohol.
• Support removal — clip the fine supports while the part is still slightly soft, then trim the nubs.
• Cure — a final UV cure hardens the part to full strength.
• Sand and paint — optional, the same as FDM, for a display finish.

None of this is optional overhead — it's part of every resin job, so it belongs in every resin quote.

Charge for labor, not just plastic

The classic mistake is pricing only material and machine time and treating finishing as "free." Finishing is skilled hand labor, and it's often the biggest real cost on a detailed part. Two ways to capture it:

• Hourly finishing rate — track the minutes and bill them, the same way you'd bill any labor.
• Finish tiers — offer named levels so customers self-select and you don't quote each one from scratch.

Offer finish levels as a menu

Tiers make finishing easy to sell and easy to price:

• Standard — supports removed, cleaned up, ready to use. Included.
• Smooth — sanded to reduce layer lines. Adds labor.
• Display — sanded, primed, and painted to a presentation finish. Premium.

A customer who picks "display" has agreed to the price before you lift a file of sandpaper.

Make the labor visible in the quote

Finishing only pays if it shows up in the number. Set a labor rate and a per-tier add-on once, and let every quote carry it automatically. In KTIZO 3D you can build finishing into your pricing so the labor is priced in by construction rather than remembered (or forgotten) job by job. The goal is simple: never sand for free.