Slacker! This year, you need to break into the 3D Printing rabbit-hole!
mnem
Hahaha. I could, but my library is pretty generous and has a 12x16x16in PLA printer for $1/hour fee. Materials are free. I can't beat that, anywhere. They sometimes clean up the part for me, which I tell them is not necessary
Yeah, but that's usually a lot of waiting in line, especially for a window long enough to do a large high-res print that can take a day or two. Besides...
there is something to the music of a Prusa-family Cartesian industriously printing away all night... you drift off to sleep just like when you were 10 on Christmas Eve, visions of your current 3DP "sugar plums" dancing in your head.
The perfect lullaby for any maker/fixer like me. If you're willing to paint, I'd print it face down; you'll get a nice mirror finish off the glass that smooths up nicely with satin/semi-flat paint. You also would waste a lot less filament for supports. The down-side is that text is more finicky, and will require touch-up by hand. Your best "OEM-Look" will come from printing face-down on glass with no dropped text or symbols, then painting and applying decals for the text.
Exactly what I was planning. I'm wondering is I should get a mirror to make some nice flat surface. The Creality glass bed is not completely smooth.
I got into the mirrors for my BLTouch auto-level, but found it was more assache than it was worth.
I KEPT THEM for the convenience more than print surface; once leveled they pretty much keep their level, so toys like the BLTouch become more hassle than they're worth. Even with them working correctly, you have to tweak manually by watching the first layer half the time, so WTF good are they really?
Being able to set one print aside to cool and start the next one immediately is really nice. It's also fun to watch the parts cool and pop and jump off the surface all by themselves.
The bed on my Tornado has a clone BuildTak print surface; it yields what I'd call a "semi-gloss" finish to the end-product. That is actually pretty nice for a panel. I have yet to peel that off and see what's underneath; but I need to as it has started to bubble and is affecting the stability of my mirrors, and I believe that additional dissimilar material layer is most of what is responsible for the poor thermal response I'm getting with my mirrors, which requires an additional 5-10 minutes heating for uniformity, even though my 120V bed "comes to temp" in like 90 seconds.
If you're talking about this glass bed, it looks to me like it yields a pretty glossy finish on the end-product. If you're talking about the silicon-carbon build plate (a composite plate of carbon fiber and thin glass bonded to a traditional aluminum build plate) I can't say; I haven't actually had one in hand.
Unless your surface is really rough or has poor uniformity, probably will still look good once painted, aside from the usual issues of stringing on edges, corner peeling, etc. Your best answer, of course, would come from whipping out a quick 150mm x 150mm x 2-3mm plate to see what it looks like painted. Something like that could be printing while you design the actual part.
mnem
"FORE!!!"