oh my GOSH I’m so excited to finally have this thing working!! I spent a solid week designing this screen printer. The original idea was inspired by a Youtube video that showed off the ability to make screens for screen printing using a resin printer. 

I absolutely ran with this idea and a week or two later, I have a working screen printer that will allow me to quickly paint pins, ornaments, shirts, and other things using my own designs! Amazing what motivation can come from not wanting to manually do anything like painting. XD

The screen printer includes a removeable bed so that you can 3d print a bed for use with different thicknesses of materials, or other objects. Down below details how I made these pins in the pic!

The process of making a start to finish project for this has quite a few steps. First you have to 3d print the frames for your screens. The size of your frame is determined by the size of your resin printer which you will later use to flash an image of the desired design onto the screened frame.

After 3d printing the frames, I insert screen printing mesh in between the two halves of the frame, super gluing it and hitting the screen with a hair dryer to tighten it up. Then I place the screened frame inside of my resin printer and flash a mirrored design of my choice onto the screen. The stl file for the resin printer is made by doing a negative boolean of my design in a rectangular cube that is only about .2 mm thick. That tricks my resin printer into making this with a 45 second exposure time. 

After washing and curing the screen, it’s ready to use!! Then I engrave the 6 pins onto a piece of wood with my laser,, and cut out the shape that slots into the screen printers bed. After screening it, I then put the painted pins back into the same place on my laser engraver, which cuts out the individual pins!

I’m still trying to get acrylic paint to work, as it’s too thick, but the sparkly paint on these pins is a glitter spray, which worked great!! I am SO happy with how this thing is coming along!!