I spent about two years sanding print lines off models before I admitted the whole approach was backwards.
If you print anything you care about, you know the moment. Geometry is clean, fit is right, colour is right. Then you turn it toward the light and every flat face is covered in fine horizontal print lines. The part is good. It just looks printed, and you wanted it to look made.
Sanding is the obvious fix and the wrong one for most prints
Sanding works on a flat panel if you have an afternoon. Coarse grit, finer grit, primer, more grit. I am not going to pretend it does nothing.
But most of what I print is organic. Figures, handles, terrain, grips. On those, sanding is a slow way to destroy the detail you just printed. Every pass rounds off the sharp edges, and you end up with a softer, blurrier version of the model that happens to be smoother. After enough ruined parts I stopped asking how to sand better and started asking why the print lines were visible at all.
