3D Printing on Top of a Shirt

Finished Product

Alright, today I am going to go through one of my favorite projects of the year.  The project we are going to be discussing is how we printed directly on top of our t-shirt.  I must confess that I was really worried that Dremel was going to be very upset at me for trying this out, but I heard nothing but good things from them.  So, now that we've got that out of the way, let's talk about how we did this.

Make sure your clips are firmly attached to the bed!

I will admit that I was nervous that I was going to light this shirt on fire.  I had visions of the fire alarm going off and having an epic fail while attempting this.  That, however, did not happen.  The trickiest thing about this is getting your shirt firmly attached to the bed.  You want to make sure it is pulled tight, so there are no wrinkles on the shirt, and then you will want to level your bed once your shirt is on top of the bed.  The biggest issue I had was having the clip on the left of the bed hit the filament.  On my first attempt, the clip hit that area when the bed was raising, which knocked the clip off.  After that, I adjusted where the clip sat, and it all worked well.

Time Lapse of the Print

Once the shirt was attached firmly to the bed without the clips being knocked off, it was smooth sailing.  The print was rather fast, and the Dremel 3D40 did an excellent job printing as well as it would with a normal print bed.  Looking back, I had the print probably a little too tall (the objects clink together), but it works well.  The most surprising thing to me was that there was absolutely no melting of the shirt at all.  The print is firmly attached to the shirt, but it can also be easily removed, which allows me to use the shirt again with other prints.  I have also been surprised at how durable this is.  I printed on this shirt 6 months ago, and the print is still firmly attached.

My students were very excited to see that I was printing on a shirt.  The beauty of this project is it gave a lot of my students completely new ideas on things to attempt using a 3D Printer.  This is a fun and easy project that you can attempt and be successful with.  As long as you have your shirt attached securely, you will be ready to go.

For more information, check out this video: https://youtu.be/NlQCWMVCr4M