Tuesday, September 21, 2010

A Failed Experiment with Kraft Paper

After seeing the new Makerbot ABP I was curious about build surfaces.  One that I thought might work was Kraft paper.  It has a similar surface to painters tape is very cheap and could possible allow for a ABP type conveyor.  So I taped some down to my build board and tried printing.


The results with a small part were very good, although the paper seemed to lift up where it was not taped down.
I then tried larger parts where the results were probably usable, however they were VERY warped (although the pictures do not show it very well)...

3 comments:

  1. For a film like this you need very good adhesives. Or, in the case of the ABP a lot of tension and tensile strength. BoPET (Biaxially reinforced PET) is used in the ABP (proud to say that this was my idea, but Charles knew of PET so eventually he would've tried that too.

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  2. Ok makes me wonder if this is fine just usage mistake.

    maybe the paper should have been under tension so it could not bend up. Rollers at each end of the table.

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  3. It's very, very difficult to tension kraft paper enough that it won't come up. There are stronger papers that letterpress printers use, but I think some kind of low-tack adhesive might be better all round.

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