HOWTO make a t-shirt printer

The Hack-a-Day folks have written up a HOWTO for making your own t-shirt printer (that is, a printer that runs directly onto the tee, instead of onto a heat-transfer). The real item will cost you $5-10K, but you can hack your own out of pressboard, miscellaneous hardware, and an old inkjet printer.

How-to: DIYDTG (Thanks, Jakob!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Gadgets

More at Boing Boing

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Hackers prepare for first "national holiday" in their honor

Anonymous

“The real item will cost you $5-10K”
Pardon me? I think you mean the retail item.
Hacks are real, m’kay?
Anonymous

You people do realize there are unwashable inks out there.
Anonymous

too lazy to register :)

Thanks for this (and all your other useful, funny, interesting links)
Sandbox World

Seems like a lot of work when you can just buy a printable iron-on sheet.
Anonymous

Won’t the ink run horribly the 1st time you try to wash it?
- Anonymous
  
  Treat the shirt with Bubble Jet Set (http://www.cjenkinscompany.com) to set the ink.
  
  This assumes you use dye-based ink on your printer. Pigment-based inks (such as those used in Kodak printers) are much less colorfast, even with heat and chemical setting.
Anonymous

This is a really cool idea. It goes to show that the $5-10k version is a seriously over priced piece of engineering. The only real problem that I see is the ink will just wash off. May be someone out there can find a solution? How about a die-sublimation printer instead?
coaxial

Whatever happened to DIY screen printing?
- BrotherPower
  
  Amen. This is clever, but it seems like a solution in search of a problem.
  
  (Plus, there’s the washing problem.)
jimkirk

Re: washing, there was a link to special DTG inks.
http://dtginks.com/

I’m waiting for a hack to turn an impact dot matrix printer into a raster scan tattoo gun.
PushTheOtherButton

You mean now I can rescue inkjet printers from the garbage AND make a cute t-shirt for my wife so she doesn’t yell at me? Amazing….
eddieduggan

Look out for our forthcoming Hack-a-day tutorial where we’ll show you how to use a video camera to record video *and* audio at the same time!