Stephan
Datatek Printing
North American Mig Consortium (NAMC) was formed to share ideas, build techniques and test results in pursuit of a park jet that suits our flying styles. This additionally will be a forum to freely post and share ideas and have a lot of fun! If you don't have gmail or google accounts and want to send us questions, please do so at scott@migsrus.com. Your e-mails may be re-posted in the blog to benefit other followers. Puto, Consilium, Test et Convalidandum; Think, Design, Test, and Validate
Friday, January 9, 2015
New way to print your plans
Staples raised their prices so I started looking for alternatives. I found a place that does engineering plans and found out they do a whole lot more. The have a huge suction table and can print on about any material including glass. So we got to talking and they printed my plans onto the Depron. Few minor issues to work out. Next time I will "paint" the plane in my drawing program and will print the plans. How cool will that be. I may end up spending more time programming and designing than building and flying. Mig Swift colors for the Mig-35 and a stealthy scheme for the Mig-PAK FA prototype.
Stephan
Datatek Printing
Stephan
Datatek Printing
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Excellent idea! Next will be taking the printed depron to be laser cut! Seriously, this is cool!
ReplyDeleteDave,
ReplyDeleteI'll have to admit, I thought it was pretty cool as well. I'm looking forward to "painting" some schemes and printing a plane that's already painted. My kids gave me a gift certificate to a place called Mind Gear. You can 3D print and CNC laser cut. They also have a drill bit cutting machine. We'll see where this all takes me, I have some ideas......
Stephan
Cool! Have you figured how to index the top and bottom of the foam so the printing lines up?
ReplyDeleteDave,
ReplyDeleteI'm working with print shop. We'll do the front side run, flip it over and do a mirror image run. Graphics on both sides, more to follow.
Stephan
Stephan, exactly. I was thinking about how you will need to create a mirror image for the second side and where you place that mirror image either in the Cartesian coordinates of the CAD model or within a "print area" to use a Windows term will dictate where the printer lays down ink. It's a great enhancement!
ReplyDeleteDave
Stephan, have you ever printed on the front and back of a sheet using a PC printer before the advent of fancy PC duplex printers? I always have to draw an arrow on one side to ensure I put the printed page in the printer the right side facing out. With a large flat bed printer, the printer will index to a corner that it decides is the corner of the drawing. Flipping the depron over ...you'll need to know which is facing out and precisely where the "corner" is. I'm sure you've thought of all this. I'm just very excited for you. I consider myself a good builder and not so good painter or covering artist so doing away with paint is very appealing to me! Please keep us posted.
ReplyDeleteDave
Dave,
DeleteThanks for the great comments to our blog. You add a lot of great information.
I use a Mac program iDraw which is a vector based drawing program. It has been an arduous but entertaining process learning the software. Once I am confident with this software I may take on CADCAM but I have to put virtual Windows on my Mac, the darkside!!
For the final print, I made a copy of the layer, did a horizontal flip and then checked all the coordinates and it worked. The guys at the shop have this huge (10x6? ft) vacuum table with top loaded sliding print head that spans the length and rolls down tracks, very impressive. They are figuring print head height and such so they haven't charged me yet.
I'm with you there, I like to build but get not spend much time painting. I usually use a base coat of spray paint and then add to that.
I will post the final "painted" plans under my Mig-PAK FA T-50 blog.
Stephan