3D Printed Roller Blind?


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:

roller.zip

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.

the tarp is being fixed with tape

Now the two brackets are screwed on. Don’t forget washers inside and outside!

the brackets are being screwed to the ends of the stick, with the caps and beaded chain already in place.

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.

clamping profilethe end of the clamping profile is being sawn off

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!

diy 3d printed roller blind