Care & repair
Printed plastic is more durable than people expect and fails in more predictable ways than people expect. Most damage is fixable — send a photo before you bin anything.
Cleaning
Warm water, a drop of dish soap and a soft brush. Dry it properly — water sitting in a layer gap will eventually work its way into a seam.
Never use acetone, alcohol, or a solvent-based cleaner on a printed piece unless you know what it's made of. IPA is fine on cured resin and will haze PLA. Nothing here should go in a dishwasher.
Heat
This is the one that actually kills prints. A PLA piece left in a parked car in summer will sag out of shape and it does not come back. PETG buys you about 20°C more headroom, which covers a warm room but not a dashboard.
If a piece is going somewhere hot, tell me before I print it and it goes out in PETG regardless of what the listing says.
Sunlight
UV yellows resin over months and slowly makes PLA brittle. Neither is an issue indoors away from a direct beam. Outdoors, PETG in a shaded spot is the only combination I'd promise anything about.
If something breaks
Clean layer-line separation glues back almost invisibly with medium cyanoacrylate. Clamp it, thirty seconds, done. Don't use an epoxy on a fine detail — it wicks into the texture and fills it.
Send a photo to hello@boltcraft.net and I'll tell you whether it's a glue job or a reprint. Reprints of a piece that failed at a print defect are free, forever, no time limit — that one's on me.
Painting a bare piece
Busts and helms ship bare or primed grey. If yours came bare, a rattle-can grey primer at a distance of about 20cm, two light coats rather than one heavy one, is all it needs before acrylics.
Don't prime in direct sun or below about 10°C — both cause the primer to go on rough, and on resin that texture is permanent.