Hi, I was researching inkjet printing onto stiff substrates. There are machines out there.. some at eyewatering prices.. and I wondered if it was possible to install a printhead to my basic 600 x 900 cnc machine. I believe you can buy an Epson Head (possibly with UV curing) + CISS.. or even strip an existing inkjet printer. Are there people doing this..? Perhaps it's not feasible..? Comments plis..
I haven't seen it, but I don't see why it wouldn't be possible. as long as your CNC controller and your printhead controller can talk to each other in a fairly rudimentary fashion (ie. new line, line stop, reverse line, whatever) it should be pretty doable. I assume the timing of the printhead relies on a continuous travel speed, I don't know how the layer height works, if there needs to be any overlap, etc. to avoid muddy or white lines, but that's probably fairly straightforward to trial and error. It would certainly be an interesting experiment if you've got a cheap inkjet printer to tear apart (and inexpensive ink to experiment with). Just establishing communication with the proprietary printhead controllers would probably be the hardest part.
Thanks Rob, This is going to be way beyond my skills so I was hoping someone had travelled this path and could advise. I assume there are 2 distinct software issues.. when to move the head and at what speed.. and when to squirt ink. I believe Epson do sell a 'kit' as some flat bed printers are big.. 3m x 2.8m and are probably custom built. There's one at the Design centre in Islington under the mezanine.
I actually see a few results (once I mentally filter out the Far Eastern supplier results) on Google for "DIY flatbed UV printer" or something like that, could be worth looking into if it's something you're particularly interested in. Someone should have already done the heavy lifting of the reverse engineering for most popular brands, in theory. Or maybe there's an SDK, I dunno.
Hate to chime in on here but what you are asking is not do able.. In simple terms you new just more then a print head you need the stepping stop behind it you need the stepping wheel that tells the printer where the paper is at .. I have built some dtg printers. And some uv printers. You are limited to the width of the printer. Their are alot of other sencers that need to be used. Their is a board out that simulate these other sencers. If you want to build a printer to print on hard items just better off to build a diy if printer. Best printer to use is a epson p600 but understand you are pretty much gutting the printer. I my self just run my project on my cnc do all my milling and then do clean up and then if I want if print on it I just run it on my uv printer.. As it is most simple way to do it as I have the outline from my cnc file as my template for my uv file.. Sorry to bust you bubble on the plan you have. It is just not worth doing in cost wise. As the biggest uv printer done on a diy level is the epson p600. Your large format printers. Are still out of price range to a diy if or dtg build as cheapest large format can run you 1500 plus just to tare it down and on them printers their is 2 times the amount of sencers that all take time to get the right timing in place for a good use able code to be useful at that size..
I don't think inkjet printing is doable. the heads (either bubblejet or piezo) rely on an incredible precision in both drive electronics and mechanics. The existing heads are also incredibly closed-shop with some extraordinary lengths taken to stop people interfacing to them. It really depends what you want to print, though. Have you considered adding a micro airbrush instead?
What about if you were to go on a smaller scale like a3. The Epson L1800 or L14000 couldn’t you just use all stock electronics and change out the dampers, ciss (blackout tubes), wiper then add in uv lamp 12v power supply. Also can convert to dtg? I want to do this but not sure how difficult it is. Little information online about it. Any advise would be great
Yes!!! Go check out openDTG.com there is a ton of info on building it to open-source adruino software.
They have several forums discussing diy DTG, UV Flatbeds, DTF, even the DIY pretreatment machines. Never let anybody tell you it's not possible where there's a will there's a way!!
This guy named Jay at jaysprinterparts.com sells replacement parts for some printers made by a company called Refine Color in China. He sells, among other things, the Epson xp600 print head and the main board used by Refine Color. That handles all of the motion and interfaces with their printing software. There is a bunch of other stuff you’ll need like a capping station, tubing, vacuum pump(s?), UV light and whatnot. I am uncertain what size bed their main board would handle but I doubt they’d have designed their board so that isn’t configurable. But in any case, their board does the heavy lifting of controlling motion and making the print head squirt. I’d also love to build one but I’m not sure I won’t just buy one. This is definitely a project!
