Printing on fabric *Work in progress*

 

This is a work in progress but as the blog is being written at the same time as I am working (for a change), I thought I might as well publish it to make it a live update of sorts. So do pop back in the future to see when I finally give up and set the lot on fire.

To save a load of wasted effort with me explaining all of this again. Here is the Prusa blog which walks you through the process of using your printer on fabric. There is even a video linked in their blog.
I decided to give this a go as I need some work t-shirts and what better way to show off my 3D printing than a 3D printed T-shirt logo? Well I can think of a few things but it is still cool.

fig.01

The first step is nice and easy, simply print the frame and glue a load of magnets to it. I had the same issue as many others, with a slight shift on the upper layer on one side. One used founds adding more supports helped prevent that. Well maybe, they also swapped to PLA. Either way, mine wasn't that bad and was perfectly usable so I was one and done.

fig.02

Now All I had to do was slap on a bed, throw an old t-shirt on it and clip it in place. I started a print and wound the Z offset all the way up before dialling in the first layer. This took me a while as it kept hitting a Z leveling enforcement error and loosing live Z adjustment. 

I ended up calibrating to a raised bed with no cloth on it, then fitting the t-shirt as tight as I could get it. It is shown above with the bed inside the t-shirt. 

fig.03

This worked in PLA, sticking a decent first layer although it was very apparent that  lot more extrusion was going to be needed. 

When I swapped to TPU, I found this setup allowed the shirt to move too much, when I finally got it to print it started okay but I later spotted it dragging the fabric. When I removed this failed print, the extrusion was evidently far too close.

I decided to raise the Z and try again somewhere else on the scrap t-shirt but I couldn't even get it to bed level again. 

15/01/23

With a few hours put into this and other projects to do, I put this idea to one side till the subject popped up on Redit.

My re-attack would involve raising the Z height whilst increasing the flow and probably temperature to make up for the reduced affect from the heated bed.