Printing on plastic

This was fun

I printed this spider on an 8x10 piece of plexiglass, which wasn't easy cuz the plexi wanted to warp as soon as I turned on the bed heater, so, getting it to lay flat while I printed on it was... challenging at best

The nice thing about it tho, was if you can keep the plexi flat, and get the nozzle close enough, and hot enough, the filament bonded with the plexi. Then I got an 8x10 piece of glass, put it on top of the spider, built a frame to hold all the parts, put some black felt as a background, stuck a string of RGB lights (with a remote control. cost like $6 on amazon) and covered the whole thing with a picture frame (which I also made). I had to measure it just right, so it hid all the inner bits, but still left the spider

Funny thing is, this was actually a reject from something I made for somebody else (whose name is Spidr. Dunno why he spells it like that. That's the way it's spelled on his tattoo) He wanted it to cover almost the whole 8x10 sheet, and this one was too small, so I kept it, then, the other day I found it while looking for something else, and decided that it turned out so nice, I didn't want to throw it away. and this is what I ended up with...

If I had thought about it sooner, I would have put some reflective window tinting on it to make it like one of those infinity mirrors, but, I didn't think about that til after I finished it, and now I don't feel like taking it apart

I think the biggest pain in the arse was the glass. I had to clean it perfectly, so I had to wear rubber gloves so that I didn't smudge it with my fingers as I was cleaning it

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You really like spiders don't you. :fearful:

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You must have a big printer to accept a sheet that big.

nice work!

bunch of printers in the beginning, before nopheds idea of heated bed, were using plexi (acrylic) as print bed material... e.g. famos rapman 3.0, 3.1 image link .. was using acrylic sheet as bed (the whole printer was acrylic)... you can easily print PLA on cold acrylic, it sticks nicely and does not warp (that was 25x25cm bed, my biggest test was 23x23cm base, cold acrylic bed, no heating, no warping). Printing ABS on acrylic.. sticks but warps, maybe a single layer would work but .. PETG might work, dunno, had no idea about PETG at the time.. anyhow for this type of work PLA will work awesome :slight_smile:

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Not really. It's only 220 x 220. The spider itself is only about 8 inches while the plexi is 10, so there's an inch at either end where nothing got printed. I've got SPACE for 10x10, but it won't print on all of it