A 3D printed roller blinds – is that possible? Well, yeah – sort of.
I had the Fluxing logo printed on a tarp to hang it in front of my window as a roller blind. Unfortunately you can’t buy a roller blind with your own design, and I thought it was too expensive buy a suitable roller blind just to disassemble it, especially since I still had a chain from an old roller blind.
So I used Sketchup to reconstruct the mechanism. To explain that in detail takes too long here, but I wil happily make a Sketchup Tutorial if you want me to. Here are the files:
Now I have printed the designed parts with my 3D printer. This will take a while, of course. By the way, I have a very inexpensive 3D printer, but it does the job very well:
CTC 3D printer at ebay.com*
or at Amazon.com*
or at Aliexpress.com*
I trimmed a broom stick with a diameter of 24mm to the correct length.
Now we need hot glue. Pro tip: While the hot glue gun is heating up, you can eat some cookies. I can easily do half a pack in that time. The caps are glued to the broom handle.
I temporarily fixed the tarp to the stick tape. It is still is, by the way. The edge of the tarp must be exactly straight. Maybe I should have marked this. The tarp is rolled up and fixed.
Now the two brackets are screwed on. Don’t forget washers inside and outside!
I designed the brackets with holes to screw them to the wall. But since I have smooth basement walls, I am lazy, and the hot glue is still hot, I simply glued the bracket to the wall. That seems to work very well.
And that’s how the roller blind works. But it’s still very wavy. I thought it might hang straighter if I stuck an old wooden strip to the bottom as weight. That was a silly idea.
In the local hardware store I bought a clamping profile for about 2 Euro. I pushed it onto the lower edge of the tarp from the side. But be careful, if it slips out, it only helps to start from the beginning. I made a pencil mark on my second attempt to see if the tarp slipped away. Now only saw off the surplus end of the profile. It’s looking pretty good.
You see, a 3d printer is very handy for printing all sorts of stuff that you just don’t have at hand. If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave them in the comments, I will answer as soon as possible. So bye for now, see you next time!
