Other Manufacturing

Welding

I’ve started to learn welding at Purdue’s Bechtel Innovation and Design Center. Most of my projects have been TIG welding steel and aluminum.

3D Printed T-Shirts

You can use a 3D printer to print temporary or permanent patterns on t-shirts. It’s a useful technique to make one-off shirts for an event, or personalized gifts.

PLA patterns usually come off after a handful of washes, while TPU is permanent. The challenge is keeping the shirt in tension, so the extruder doesn’t catch in the shirt and burn the fabric.

For temporary PLA shirts, the level of adhesion can be toggled via the flow rate. The higher flow rate, the more the plastic seeps into the fabric.