Using 3D Printers

Produced By- Dave White. Head of D&T Clevedon School

Woodblock printing Woodblock printing is a technique

for printing text, images or patterns used widely throughout East Asia and originating in China in antiquity as a method of printing on textiles and later paper.

As a method of printing on cloth, the earliest surviving examples from China date to before 220, and from Egypt to the 4th century.

Text and picture from Wikipedia

Printing blocks The wood block is carefully prepared as a relief

matrix, which means the areas to show 'white' are cut away with a knife, chisel, or sandpaper leaving the characters or image to show in 'black' at the original surface level. The block was cut along the grain of the wood. It is only necessary to ink the block and bring it into firm and even contact with the paper or cloth to achieve an acceptable print. The content would of course print "in reverse" or mirror-image, a further complication when text was involved. The art of carving the woodcut is technically known as xylography, though the term is rarely used in English.

For colour printing, multiple blocks are used, each for one colour, although overprinting two colours may produce further colours on the print. Multiple colours can be printed by keying the paper to a frame around the woodblocks.

Text from Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodblock_printing

CAD/CAM printing blocks Why not design a

printing block using a 3D CAD program.

Print the block using either a RapMan or BfB3000 printer.

3D printing

The printing block needs a flat backing to build the relief image. For larger prints it may be necessary to use PLA to prevent warping.

Use a roller to apply a thin layer of ink to the block. The block should be pressed firmly onto the surface to be printed. A soft pad is needed behind the print surface to allow the image to press into the surface. A thick layer of paper, card, felt or leather could all be used

Concave or convex? One prints the letters,

the other prints the background!

Making an impression Why stop at printing on

paper or fabric. The print block can be used to make impressions in a whole range of materials such as clay… or maybe even food products such as bread dough or biscuit mix.

William Morris prints

My inspiration One of my D&T A level students also does Art. … and being Aaron Thorogood, one of the students

who came to Euromold 2010 with us, he wanted to see if he could use 3D printing in his coursework project. So, I have to give him some credit for coming up with the idea of block printing.

I sent him away to design a block using Pro/Engineer (Creo Elements/Pro) reminding him to make sure that he “flipped” the image. A few minutes later Aaron had produced the first design and converted it to g-code with Axon. Of course this was far too easy… we found that the letters didn’t print well (too skinny) so this is where the ability to design iteratively with RapMan and BfB3000 is so valuable… Aaron produced design version 2.

Armed with some block printing ink and one of those rubber rollers that artists use for this sort of thing we inked the surface, placed the block between some MDF scraps and a bit of leather… and squished it in a metalwork vice.

It works!!!! Ok, we need to do some more development work on this and maybe do some research but it looks like

Aaron has come up with a winning idea.

I then started thinking about next steps and what this block printing know-how can be used for…. And my mind has started to wonder about printing textiles. After all William Morris (English Arts and Crafts movement 1880 -1910) used wood block printing for his beautiful designs.

Posted in my blog Feb 2011 3dprintineducation.wordpress.com