3d Lamination ideas

I have often found that if you really want ideas about efficent material handling, you should look at textiles. Clothing manufactures have some of the most ingeinus ideas about how to make 3d objects out of basically 2d materials. I strongly recommend that if you have never taken a basic sewing class that you do so, the little tricks that people have come up with are based on on very subtle understanding about materials in general.

I am fortunate to live (and sleep), with an expert seamstress (she even lets me into her sewing room occasionally if I promise not to touch anything). And while on one of the rare supervised visits it occured to me that I might very well have a basic fabrication lab already in my home. For about $1/m^2 you can get thin muslin fabric, and for a little more you can get an amazing material called Fusible Interfacing, which is simply a thin batting material with dots of hot-melt glue attached to one or both of the surfaces.

Alternate layers of muslin and interfacing and you can build a 3d object without worring about lamination adhesive. The interfacing is specifically designed to be activated by the heat of an iron. More importantly the result will be VERY easy to impregnate with support resin, much more so than laminating paper or plastic. Fused deposition modeling with a $10 iron, a $5 pair of scissors, and about $50 worth of fabric and support resins. Cut stencils for the common pieces and you can just spraypaint a pattern onto the fabric.

We would really need to get a version of the parts in something like a PDF to make printing and tracing simple. I asked Forrest for a copy of the slice and dice but will have to go over to my mothers to use her PC since it wont run on my Mac. I really, really stink at these software issues so if any of you computer guru types want to step in and speed this up by a couple of months now would be the time.

Mike

The thoughts and ideas expressed in this post do not reflect those of my employer and are intended only as communications between individuals. Any attempts at implement are at your own risk

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/12/2007 09:17PM by ohiomike.

Quick question: What is the maximum resolution you think you can get out of this in both the XY plane (aka how accurate are your fingers/scissors) and the Z dimension (aka how thick is the fabric, and how uniform)? Remember also that after cutting out all of the pieces, you'll need a pretty accurate way to stack them up in the same positions relative to each other that they were when you pulled them out of the slice and dice software. I'm not sure of the best way to do that; thru holes might be a place to start though.

Kyle

It really depends on the dimensional accuracy requirements of you finished repstrap. Not to mention that you can always build slightly large and sand the finished material to whatever level of accruacy you desire. Ideally you would be able to quickly build those parts that dont require high tolerance and then make priority decisions about the others. And of course nothing says you have to build all of your parts using one method. Use this method for 25-50%, woodworking for another 25-50%, and hire out true FDM for the critial parts. All based on what your skills and budget can handle.

Quilters use rotary cutters, pre-built jigs, grid-marked cutting boards and a variety of other "tricks" to achieve extremely tight tolerances. My wife's sewing room is stuffed to the gills with them.

As for myself I intend to examine this method for the making of MOLDS for parts not for the parts themselves. That would allow me to then use the tight tolerance, high productivity, low cost materials that I already have access to.

Mike

The thoughts and ideas expressed in this post do not reflect those of my employer and are intended only as communications between individuals. Any attempts at implement are at your own risk

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/12/2007 09:17PM by ohiomike.

Tolerance would be influcenced by thread count. How would you control positioning of the layers?

If you cut every layer with scissors, your hands would get very cramped. Is there a machine that cuts cloth like a pen plotter?

Sounds like a rapid prototyping machine I read about several years ago. It used the brown butcher paper (wax on one side). It was rolled over a frame with the wax side down. An stage raised up from underneath so the paper was stretched. Then a laser cut out the pattern. The cutting action of the laser also melted some of the wax at the edge. The stage lowered pulling the cut out with it. The paper was advanced so nothing but fresh paper was above the work area. Then the sequence was repeated. This was used to make simple and quick molds for sheet metal short run stamping. They also could add in metal bracing as needed to make it stronger.

I think the company you are thinking of is Helisys R.I.P.
I did a technical evaluation of the company some years back.
The machine worked like a charm. You had to manually break out support structures, but this was not to difficult. It turns out that the demise of the company related to the fact that they used ordinary butcher paper (white when I saw them) as the laminating material. They could not sell enough machines to sustain the business on machines alone, anyone smart enough to buy one was smart enough to go buy butcher paper wholesale. For many of the rapid prototyping machines the profit is in the prototyping materials.

There's still at least one in operation. At my alma mater.

[www.rpc.msoe.edu]

ohiomike wrote:

> We would really need to get a version of the parts in something
> like a PDF to make printing and tracing simple. I asked Forrest
> for a copy of the slice and dice but will have to go over to my
> mothers to use her PC since it wont run on my Mac.

I'm unlikely to take this on right now, but ... since you have a Mac, starting from the Java codebase rather than VB would seem more logical?

It might be very practical to hack the current RepRap code to print to something very like nullcartesian, and then at the end of each layer, output a bitmap of the just-finished layer as a .gif or (to keep it really simple) as a .pbm -- then convert to something fancier like PDFs later in a shell script using netpbm or similar graphics utilities. Maybe do this as a "PBMcartesian" (or "PileOfFiles" ?) printer type -- then it could become a permanent part of the standard RepRap host software, and you'd not need to keep borrowing your mother's PC :-)

Jonathan

I must admit that I understood about 60% of that. I can write the smallest amount of virtual basic, and that makes me a software guru among material scientists. But I get the gist, that it is possible to modify the existing code so that you can take a STL file and output a pile of GIFs or PBMs rather than sending it to the robot.

That might make an interesting way to eventually test the tolerances of the reprap. Place a paper print-out in the build area prior to printing that layer, observe, and measure any difference between the 2d and 3d printouts. That could lead to us being able to standarize a set of tests for performance, which would greatly simplify debugging new machines. It would also make possible a grading system by which a buyer could make a apples to apples comparison between two different repraps (or even reprap designs) if they were different generations and across the country from each other.

Mike

The thoughts and ideas expressed in this post do not reflect those of my employer and are intended only as communications between individuals. Any attempts at implement are at your own risk

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/12/2007 09:16PM by ohiomike.

hai my name is nagaraj i have a photo print of 20" x 30" i have to get 3d laminated, what is the procedure and where it can be done.
please reply
regards
nagaraj