Absolutely brilliant. I just contacted my local print shop (They're about a mile away) and I found out they do dye-sub printing. I can design artwork for my project, email it to them and later in the day nip over there and pick it up. My shop quoted $6.00US for an 8x10 sheet for singles and a sliding scale for multiples. Instead of buying a printer and all that entails just call up your local print shop and see if they do dye-sub. Oh, and my shop can do prints bigger than my Artillery Sidewinder X2 print bed.
$6 for a regular sized sheet of paper?? Thats expensive. I made my own sublimation printer a few years ago like mentiomed in the video and maybe spemt like $200 total on the printer, ink, paper and a few sub blanks
@@animodeoh Yeah, but If you only want to Test it or use this technique ocasionanally it Checks Out. I don't have more space for another printer, but might want to try IT on a Phone Case.
I found some sellers on Etsy who sell prints of your own files as well. Shipping would be the consideration of price comparison of course. I found one for $3/letter size but shipping was $7.95 :( I imagine once one gets into quantities that might become reasonable, so if space for an extra printer is the issue, it could be worthwhile.
@@animodeoh Have you checked how much it will cost you if you are printing a full colour page? If you print full colour it might very well still cost you >2$/page
I wonder if using transparency sheets for inkjet printers would work better than printing on regular paper. They could stick to the 3d printed part - depending on how it works it may be a bug or a feature :)
After 28 years of struggling with troublesome printers, I broke down and got an EcoTank last year. I don't use it for sublimation, but its performance has been relatively stellar. Why? It works. I press PRINT and it prints properly, even after not using it for weeks. No extra steps needed. No driver reinstallation required. No fighting with ink cartridges required. No intrusive, periodic demands to set everything up all over again. When you say it's good for this particular 3D printing purpose, I believe you
Our ET (2650) was the worst, because when not used, the print head dried and didn't recover with any number of cleaning cycles. For non-frequent use cheap printers with expensive cartridges (with new, clean print heads) are easier. Cartridges can be stored "forever" :) Also the ET colours were not as and saturated as in HP and Canon, and I didn't find any way to adjust them.
@@kimmotoivanen I can see that being a problem. But I use it every week or three for non-color-critical purposes. For that it's been superior to all my past printers, which managed somehow to quietly break or get a corrupted driver between uses
@@andreamitchell4758 I have one B&W, but it doesn't have scanner. Colour laser printers did fair job even 20 years ago, not sure if they have improved to match ink jets in photo quality (glossy paper, dithering/screening). Laser "ink" is somewhat transfer-able with heat, but I doubt it works like sublimate or even normal jet ink 🤨
@@kimmotoivanen oh I just meant for regular 2d printing not for this use case Yeah I am sure color laser printers are as good if not better than inkjets I know they were even being used for counterfeit US currency so they must be pretty good. But yeah I don't even see the need to own any color printer really 99.9% of prints will be in black and white and color ink is just so ridiculously expensive it is just easier and cheaper to download the big pharmacy chain apps and send it off there. I have a nice Canon PIXMA all in one inkjet photo color printer but I think we have maybe printed a color photo on it twice and as for color prints maybe a bit more but it seems like it needs ink every 5 pages and even the cheapest Chinese ink from Amazon is still way too expensive when you compare it to just ordering prints from the pharmacy chain especially when they always have coupons or deals for free prints.
Hi. I’m a sublimation nerd. My husband is a 3D nerd… so combined we already have the equipment and skills. Firstly, sublimation only works on plastics… so the t-shirts have to be at least 50% polyester for sublimation to work. Yes there are sprays (as shown in the video) but these can be messy and do not always leave a washable image on the cotton garment. An alternative might be a DTF hack … which we shall definitely try … you will need DTF sheets that you print on through either your standard inkjet printer or, if you have one, your sublimation printer, and then you need DTF powder. This powder soaks into the wet ink right after printing, and acts like a plastic glue. If you cure the image and powder with a heat gun then use heat resistant tape to tape it to the print bed, this may provide a stronger transfer. Google DTF sublimation hack … there are a few videos on this. I’ll give it a go later this week and report back. 😊
Interesting and definitely fascinating, but a lot of steps and set-up/calibration for how often it would get used. I used to do a lot of sublimation, but if it's not done daily (or even weekly), the inks in the printer end up drying on the head(s), or if the printer has automatic cleaning/cycling, the ink gets used up in the cleaning cycle and just goes to waste. Sublimation can cost you more than you make if you are not using it on a regular basis... but... I do love this concept!
Brilliant video Michael. My wife already has a sublimation printer for her etsy store so will now have to combine that with some of my 3d print designs.
this combined with prints that fold up from being printed flat could be very interesting. no need to paint after you fold it all up. Like an unfolded cube, say. print flat, each face gets it's own section of sublimation imagery. Then take it off the print bed, fold it up and glue together, or model in some snaps. boom, full color printed cube. For low poly models this could be really interesting.
Hi everyone, tried this method and got some good result with some added technique, when printing from photoshop there is an option to print with extra ink (no need to run the paper through the printer again), when cleaning the paper from the 3D print don’t use hot water (around 30C), and the final tip is to clear spray the 3D print as a final step makes the colors pop.
You are one of the most creative people I know. This is outstanding, Think of all the possibilities. Actually, I don't believe anyone could possibly think of all the possibilities. This certainly is worth the cost of a printer and some ink to get started experimenting. Thank you enormously.
Cool video dude, we bought a sublimation printer (converted Epson) couple of years ago, and have made T-Shirts, Cups, Coasters etc, but being able to something with my 3D printer is awesome :)
Absolutely loved this video! Couldn't have picked a better face 😀. My daughter and I have been doing sublimation with an Epson Ink Tank for years. We have to run test pages basically every week to help prevent nozzle clogs.
It would be neat to see you try color laser toner transfer using an over head transparency and see how the process and quality compares using the same source image and 3D printer.
I would totally put some sort of UV blocking coating on the top of your prints. I have noticed that some D-Sub Prints tend to fade out under UV/Sunlight over time. Thanks for sharing an awesome video.
The method you demonstrated for registering the paper to the 3D print is ingenious but inflexible. If you could incorporate some registration dots into the 3D print, have them print first and then pause, you could then position the paper prior to allowing the 3D print to compete. This would allow you to create a variety of geometries while retaining the registration feature.
This is exactly why you are my favorite 3d printing youtuber! I have learned so much on here and since we already have sublimation equipment i cant wait to try this too.
This is fantastic. I may be able to incorporate this into some projects. I've used sublimation a ton in the past. Combining it with 3d printing is game changing. Thanks for making this video.
I've been doing dye sublimation at home for the past couple of years and had lightly wondered how to combine the two. VERY excited to give this a try. Thanks for sharing all the info!
I tried this a while ago as well and it worked great. I did just a quick test, so I didn't change any settings from a normal PLA print. Still came out very well. Cool and informative video as usual.
We came up with the same idea a few months too when we started doing sublimation with one of the little epson's. Wouldn't have thought of the sharpie trick though.
Wow. One could make some amazing front panels for enclosures and great images for keycaps on custom keyboards. I'm not going to run out to purchase a 2d printer for this, but may reconsider some day in the future if an extra wad of cash comes my way.
You could probably pick up a normal ink jet for free or Next to free from. Craigslist or somewhere else arnt just get a cheap refillable cart kit from China and inject the sublimation dye into the carts instead of ink. I really don't see why it needs to be an eco tank specifically other than Epson sponsorship of the video or a very trivial convenience feature That becomes even more trivial when you consider the process of transferring the due to the bottles outlined in the beginning of the video. It is just as easy if not easier to inject the dye into a refillable after market ink cart with a syringe
@andreamitchell4758 I had this thought as well. It seems like a lottt of extra additional costs. I couldn't understand justifying all of the extra purchases for the end result. It seems like you could, like you said, get a cheap printer and refill carts with sublimination dye and get the same effect. Unless there is some sort of chemical interference, why go through the trouble? I also just am not getting the hype for this idea generally though.
Just a few days ago, a friend got access to a sublimation printer. I told her that I wondered if it could work with 3D printers. Then, here you are just a few days later putting out a video about how to do that. How do you do it? I was just wondering if it could be printed then ironed onto a print. Looks like the heat needs to be too high for that based on this video, but I hadn't even thought about printing right onto it. Nor about how to convert a cheap printer to be a sublimation one. You are constantly putting out the most useful 3D printing content I have seen. And 3D printing/maker stuff is the majority of what I watch. Thanks for another great video! (*Edit for typos, but not sure I caught them all)
No, you can't do sublimation on the printed part, the pressure and temperature would melt the print or result in delamination. I was trying it for some time with at best (on ABS) some sublimation but warped prints, on TPU I ended up with a mess behind recognition. The technique came as a last resort and came out great from the start (as you can see at the start of the video). Although not recommended you can convert an existing printer to a sublimation one by cleaning the tanks and tubing. (IPA or printer cleaning fluid), then flush the ink till you have the sublimation ink in the system. Important: The printer has to be like Epson, meaning no heated print nozzles.
no. sublimation is the process of turning from a solid to a gas as stated at the beginning of the video. if you 3d print on top of the paper then it is converted to a gas by the hot plastic making contact with the dye. so the process is done at that point. you cant re animate the gas to a solid. make sense? when you understand what sublimation is you understand how it can be used.
I've also wondered about heat-gun printed shrink wrapping techniques (similar to bottles of soda). If you can use adhesive to ensure a secure mount of the shrink wrapped plastic, you can technically shrink individual parts for later assembly. This should make it possible to apply a durable full-colour "skin" on nearly any object (given a bit of assembly). A thin single layer of PLA, and a bit of glue may be effectively used with heat gun 'srhinking' to attache the full-colour surface to a separately printed object! Oh, and ECOtank is a blessing in a market of historic gouging. The amount of ink you get is SUBSTANTIAL and is cheap to replace. You get to print as you would with a laser printer: you don't have to think about consumables.
Just wanted to point out that the printer manufacturers are up to their old shenanigans with this type of printer too. Since you've got long lines with "stale" ink in them if you don't run your printer daily the first thing it does is dump a bunch of ink into a sponge. The sponge is not a "user replaceable part" and has an electronic counter on it. Once the counter is exceed, the printer is junk. So yes, still better than the old inkjets, but still some ways to go.
@@jeffreycutler7364Making that sponge non user replaceable is despicable!! But do you know for sure that it's daily? I.e. that you need to print every single day to avoid the cleaning part? I'm asking because I have a similar problem with a regular (i.e. 2d) printer from Canon that has "XL" ink tanks (that's the main reason I chose it). I very rarely print anything on it and so every time I do use it it does its cleaning thing, which wastes a lot of ink, so even though the ink tanks are "XL" size I get few pages out of them. I scheduled a task every Sunday morning to print a page of text, to avoid the cleaning phase. I choose once a week to minimise ink and paper loss but it's too seldom, as the printer still does its cleaning thing. If it needs to print every day to avoid the cleaning then there is no win, as the scheduled task itself would waste 365 pages and the ink for them each year.
@@jeffreycutler7364AFAIK, this is false. If you're referring to the maintenance tank, which it sounds like you are, they're a few bucks on Amazon and one step to replace. If there's some other pad in the printer that I'm not aware of, I guess I'll have to look into it. -- Upon doing some further reading, it seems like this might be dependent on the model you buy/age of the printer. Newer models, like the one I have, the ET-3850, have the easily replaceable maintenance box. Not sure about other/older models. Again, unless there's some other pad I'm not aware of.
@@dan-nutu It probably doesn't have to be daily. That's what one youtube review I read say. You probably don't have to print a whole page, just a quick print with all of the different colors.
For increased or decreased ink deposition on a print, we use an HSV or HSL filter in an editor and change the value (V or L). This affects the amount of white in the image, which for a printer without white ink correlates with the amount of ink deposited as white comes from the substrate. Saturation sometimes need to be adjusted slightly too (typically boosted if increasing white or reduced if reducing white), but fundamentally you need to control the white mix.
Nice! I've been doing this using a laser printer and transparency paper for about a year now! It even works with regular printer paper when using a laser printer if you rub off the paper with cold water. This is definitely a cheaper method, especially because of the high cost of color laser printers and toner! Nice job! I may replace my current laser printer setup with this just because the ink is so much more affordable.
Just buy a cheap older Epson printer for like $50 and use a $20 set of refillable cartridges. Ecotank is fine and all, but the ink tanks are pretty big and vulnerable to ink settling and lots of clogs. You have to refill more often, but also much easier to take the cartridges out and give them a good shake every few weeks as needed. To put down more ink on a page, make sure to use the setting for matte paper, puts down more ink than gloss profiles.
You can most likely get one for free and why does it have to be Epson? It can be any inkjet and you can probably find people who will pay you to remove it.
@@andreamitchell4758 Epson printers use piezo printheads, printers like HP and Canon are thermal heads which are not compatible with most sublimation inks.
@@andreamitchell4758 Heh, good luck getting an HP to print with anything but their brand cartridges unless it's extremely old. They've been doing ink lock-in longer than anyone.
You can do black&white images with a regular laser printer and transparent sheets made for overhead projectors. Printers heat is enough to sublimate the ink (edit: it melts the ink).
That's cool to hear, since I'm not nearly creative enough to make use of full color, but I could use some labels on my prints occasionally. A bit of a nit-pick though: laser toner is actually fine plastic particles, so it's not sublimation anymore, just melting the toner into your print.
@@flagman3116 Thanks for the correction, that makes way more sense. And adding labels to printed lab power supplies etc. is quite important, that is where i found the method.
For the Bambu labs, you should be able to get significant first layer squish by setting first layer to .1 mm or even .08 mm and setting first layer line width to 150% of the nozzle width. This technique interests me because I already have sublimation and DTF capabilities. I’ll give it a try with my squish settings as well. I’m wondering if this will work for DTF as well. The powder is PET I think so it may work well with PETG but not PLA. I would expect you would be able to print at a faster speed but there’s a question about whether the film could withstand the process. It should, in theory, since it can withstand the heat of the heat press in normal usage. UPDATE: I tried the DTF print with PETG and it failed completely. The filament wouldn’t adhere to the film at all. It only produced a glob of PETG that stayed with the nozzle. Fortunately I was watching and could cancel before doing any damage. But this should be a good lesson for anyone trying something new. Always watch a new process closely. When it’s been proven, then, and only then can you leave it unattended.
extra tip! epson sells sublimation ink for there ecotrank printers. and for the best results I advice a very good icc file to have the best colours printed. the normal settings are ok. but with a good icc file results are 10 times better. I have the file for eco tank printers that will greatly improve the quality of the prints. maybe @teaching tech, you can do another video, with high release paper and my icc files, to see the difference. another tip, when you use a eco tank printer for sublimation. you must print 1 page a day minimal, the paint tends to stick to the printhead if not used in a while.
For me, if I need material to squish into the build plate, in addition to lowering the Z axis a bit, in Cura, I can adjust the Initial Layer Flow which only affects the bottom layer and greatly reduces the line gaps when printing on an Ender 3 v3 SE. I use this when printing on textured build plates. It would work great for sublimation printing also. I have my initial layer flow set to 130%.
Cases with labels and colouring is a great idea. You could also make any kind of signage. I wonder what it would look like back lit with a few LEDs behind it.
Wish UV Printers are cheaper as posibilities would be endless. But it’s nice to see sublimation works directly on first layer! Great for flat models. Ty for sharing.
You should try modge podge photo transfers. People use them for wood photos. I've tried it and it on pla, works, maybe you can test for best results. With this method wouldn't be limited to base. I've heard transparency sheets are better than paper.
You can do it the other way around without attaching things to the print bed. Just 3D print the object, preferably with a flat surface in PETG, and then print the design on the sublimation paper, and then using a heat press or mini handheld press and a little bit of pressure to transfer the design. The downside is that the paper will stick to the print, however, you can easily wash it off and it looks amazing when done! Just have to be a bit careful with the temperature.
I make my custom phone cases by using a clear case and printing whatever I like on paper, cutting it to size and putting it in inside the case under the phone. It's no good for mass production or selling but for a one off it works great. My iPhone has a Sinclair Spectrum motherboard image on the back. It looks great.
This is so cool! I am tempted to buy a printer and heat press just to make my own t-shirts. If only I had a bit more disposable income and space to put all of this...
