18. Wildcard week

This week I decided to use the wildcard week to do something that I had been wanting to do for a little while but never had the time to actually go about doing: Printing directly into cloth.

I have been a fan of costumes since I was small, so when I first discovered the posibility of printing directly into fabric I was static. Unofrtunatly I have not had the chance or time to put it into practice, untill now. Having no real idea of how to go about it, I decided that I would set out to figure out by myself the best way to use this particular technique.

Having decided what I wanted to do, I went out to purchase the cloth needed for the tests. I did not actually know what kind of cloth would be best. I theorized that thin, threadbare materials would be best, but I wanted to be thorough, so I ended up acquiring a range of materials. From very thin threadbare, to more solid and thick, including some elastic material and some waterproof textile for good measure. I then cut a little square from each to use as a test.

Once I had the material, I generated I quick STl file to print.

I then decided to print the file off on its own in order to have a control sample of sorts that I could use to compare to the other prints.

Having my test print done, it was time to go about doing the actual thing. My plan was to print half the object, stop the printer, place the cloth, and then print the remaining half. At this point there are two ways to go about this: The first option is to manually stop the printer halfway into the process. This is easy and allows a certain level of manual control, however the problem is that since its manual, the stopping point is going to vary across various prints. Furthermore, it also means that someone has to stand around waiting for the right moment. This brings us to the second option: setting an automatic stop for the machine at a certain build height. Most slicers now come with this options, and for the ones that dont, a simple line of gcode can be inputted instead.

I decided however to go about it the manual way, I figured that I prefered the manual control that allowed me to test various heights. Also, since the file only took a few minutes to print (and I watched it constantly anyway to make sure it went smoothly) standing around was not a problem. If I decide to persue this technique further in the future to make something bigger I will likely put set stopping points, however. I decided to stop the printer at exactly one 1mm height, and then go from there.

First I started with the thinner, threadbare cloths, which (to my surprise) worked wonderfully.

The plastic seemed to seep in between the fabric far better than I would have hoped. I then tried the thicker material, and once again I was not dissapointed. The PLA seems to have an uncany ability to seep in between the threads and merge with the plastic beneath it. I was also pleasently surprised to find that the seal was rather tight. I had worried that the extra height would catch on the nozzle, and that I would have to adjust the Z on the fly, however this proved to be unnecesary.

Having done that, I decided to move on to the elastic material, and It was here where I started to have my first issues: I secured the material in the same way I had before, using masking tape, however the flexible nature of the cloth meant that the nozzle was able to drag it around, making for a rather messy print.

I decided to try again. This time I made sure to fully stretch the material over the object in order to stop it catching. This was partially effective. On the one hand I was successfull in making a nice, neat print. On the flipside, once I released the cloth it proceeded to bunch up around the object.

Because of this I am somewhat unsure as to how I would go about actually making a project using elastics. In theory it seems like a wonderfull idea full of posibilities, but on practice it seems rather hard to do print properly. Further research is required on this particular aspect.

Finally I decided to use the waterproof cloth. This print was, predictibly a failure (althought at this point everything was going so well I was half expecting it to work). The plastic did not seep throught and as such it did not fuse with the object on the bed. However, something rather interesting happened: The top half, whilst not actually seeping throught, fused itself to the cloth

This gave me an idea. I cleared the bed and then proceeded to place the cloth directly into the build plate, printing the entire object on top of it. As it turns out, it was a huge success: The PLA stuck itself nicely to the cloth. An added beneffit was that the cloth did not get stuck to the bed at all, so once I removed the tape holding it down, I could just remove the object without having to peel it off.

In conclusion. PLA is surprisingly good at seeping in through the threads in various cloths, even the more densly packed ones. It forms a very good seal, meaning that it is quite sturdy as well. The elastic cloths seems quite hard to print on properly, which is a pity because they have great potential. Meanwhile the waterproofed cloths (and I suspect any cloth with a high concentration of plastic to begin with) can be printed directly on top of, which has a lot of interested posibilities.

Proof of Concept.

Having Finished running all the fun tests, I decided it was time to put the knowledge to the test and produce a proof of concept of the sort of thing that could be accomplished using this sort of technique.

I thought about it for a minute, and eventually settled on making a bracelet using the same object I had been printing up to this point (call me sentimental). I went back to the desing board and remade the object into a long line. The plan was to print the object in a long line, place a long strip of cloth, and then finish of the top half.

Here I encountered a small problem. The Y seems axis jogged slightly when making the top half. I belive that might have been my fault, as a I might have knocked the plate without noticing when securing the cloth down. The jog however, was relatively minor, so I decided to go ahead anyway. This was only meant as proof of concept and as such I deemed a little margin of error to be acceptable.

Once the print finished I lifted it off and proceeded to do the cleanup. I had severely overestimated how much cloth I would need, and so found myself cutting away all the exccess material.

Once it was all cleaned up I used a little bit of tape to hold it together and I had a nice, functioning wristband.

Improvement

I was quite happy withh the proto wristband, howeveer thhere was definite room for improvemment. As such I set out to create a new and improved wristband. In order to do, I first started by creating aa new file, something a little bit thinner and that ideally would look better. I came up with this partticular desing, and proceeded to start printing