Board game tokens - similar to Bakelite

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Hi
With COVID and all my family has really got into board games. I want to upgrade some of the cardboard tokens with shinny, smooth tokens like these. (see pic)

“The pieces are made of a hard plastic, similar to Bakelite, and the graphics are applied via a 4 color heat transfer process, which fuses the images to the plastic in a way that makes them very scratch resistant”
more info here - GeekUp Bit Set: Quacks of Quedlinburg: Herb Witches Expansion – BoardGameGeek Store

How do I achieve this same type of finish and feel?
Any help appreciated

tokens

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Hi :slight_smile:
Welcome to the Forums!

It’s tricky to match the quality of injection moulding with a 3D printer. If you have one available an SLA printer would definitely be the preferred option for these. @Tim has been doing some really neat prints lately with transparent resins on a Creality LD-002R.

Here’s video showing a really nice chess set printed with a resin printer:

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Thanks @Oliver - not too concerned with the price - more about $$ and output
Any other ideas on how to achieve this?

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For finish and feel (but not the colour printing) you could try ABS and vapor smoothing.

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Any ideas on the colour printing?

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For 3D printing there’s only two options - colour of the raw material, or sintered powder printers which basically spray paint as they go.

You could always go with some transparent resin, and get some custom stickers printed on transparent film.

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I got some tips for getting colour into resin prints coming up real soon. Will link as soon as I’ve finished it :slight_smile:

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nice! what printer do you recommend?
possible to match quality in the pic above?

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Heyya mate,

Here is the guide Alcohol Inks to Colourise Resin Prints.

To make pieces like above I would recommend using a resin printer similar to a Creality like Oliver linked you above, could produce a whole bunch of pieces quickly for very cheap in any size and colour you desire.

Theres lots of different ways to do image transfer onto resin plastics, so you can get an image onto your pieces, something I plan on exploring very soon as well. Currently, I would recommend transferring the image in a method similar to this and then gloss coating it with spray paint. Or you could produce stickers which you then clear coat over the top to seal them in with a nice finish.

Hope this helps, I plan to figure out the best way soon,

Tim

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how do you think they did the picture above?
is there a way to tell?

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keen to learn how to solve this @Tim

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Hi Sync,

Mainly print settings :grin:

I’d explain in detail but All3DP covers this quite well already, following this with Tim’s post-processing guide should provide a much greater understanding of both how to create near-transparent prints, and how the hidden mechanics behind it work.

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