3D Printing Blueprints And Other Wall Art

Dec 06, 2023

Today if you want to reproduce a big schematic or a mechanical drawing, you just ask it to print or plot from the CAD model. But back in the day, you drew on big sheets at a drafting table. How do you make copies? Sure, there were a few large-format copiers, but they were expensive. A more common method was to use a heliographic copier which, often but not always, resulted in a blueprint — that is a blue page with white lines or vice versa. These days, you are more likely to see a blueprint as an artistic wall hanging, and since [Basement Creations] wanted some, he figured out how to make them with a 3D printer.

These prints aren’t really blueprints. They use the printer as a plotter and deposit white ink on a blue page. In the video below, he shows a number of ways to use a printer to create interesting wall art, even if you want it to be bigger than the print bed. Some of the wall art uses multiple 3D printed parts, and others use the printer as a plotter.

To join the printed pieces, he uses a soldering iron to weld them together. We wondered if it might be worthwhile to make overlapping pieces to glue which would also help with alignment. Plotting is great for making PCBs, of course, and while you could invert the image and print blue on white paper, it won’t really look like a blueprint.

You’d think mounting a pen to a printer is easy, and there are a lot of designs online. However, the pen needs to be rigid, and unless your bed is completely trammed, the pen needs some ability to move up and down to maintain pressure. The third mount he creates is pretty over-engineered, with two bearings and rods allowing the pen to ride up and down. It seems like a lot, but it also seems to work well. The final wall art is a 3D-printed replica of the James Webb Telescope that uses real mirrors to mimic the iconic look of that space-borne observatory.

This is one of those projects that isn’t a completely new idea, but we did like the variety of ideas and tips. Presumably, you could also join the blueprint paper to make larger ones.

This isn’t the first James Webb replica we’ve seen, but the last one had a wooden base. Maybe you could point your telescope replica at a faux moon.