I have been playing with printing on fabric! Something I really didn’t realize you could do until I saw a Facebook post from Kaizen3DPrints and was amazed at the dragon scales and other designs he was creating.
This is one of my test prints done in color changing silk filament (there are also some videos on my youtube channel). I need to work on fine tuning some settings and work on some other ideas, but I am super impressed with how this comes out and have a TON of ideas of what I can make with it.
The obvious things are scale armor and gauntlets for cosplayers, and I’m sure I’ll do some of those – but just wait! More interesting items are coming as soon as I have a chance to do them 🙂
One of the interesting things about this is you can use dimensional models too like spikes, claws and more. And on many different types of fabric.
Since these have to be printed S-L-O-W-L-Y. Like super slowly! Like 25-35mms. The workhorse printers in my print farm print between 500-600mms so seemed like a waste for them. Then I realized, scales are the PERFECT project to print on my older/slower CR-6-SE printers with a 180mms max speed! My older printers have been relegated to printing a few products a week for general inventory due to there slower speed. I love them – they were the workhorses for me until I got my 3 new printers (soon to be 4 new printers…more on that later!) – so printing on fabrics seem to be the perfect idea for them!
So I am switching my 3 CR-6-SE printers from glass beds to holographic magnetic build plates and they will be tasked with printing on fabric probably a good 90% of the time. I’m converting the first one this week as a test and if it works as I expect, the other 2 will join in the scaly fun! Not sure if my original Ender 3 or my CR-10 will join in on that or not…I’ll see how many products I come up with and how much scale prints I will be doing. I will also be selling it by the foot for cosplayers & crafters who want to incorporate them into their projects.
More about this coming soon!