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I've just enjoyed a somewhat involuntary Christmas holiday and decided to make the most out of it by focusing on something creative for the first time in months. I looked for a demo project to join but no luck there, so I decided to go all Martha Stewart and ordered a stack of water slide decals.

WTF, water slide decals, aren't those the faggy things with Jesus pictures, flowers and crying gypsies elderly women like to stick onto coffee mugs in wintertime? Yep, they sure are, but nowadays you can buy laser or inkjet printable sheets based on the same principle. Print the sheet, varnish it (couple of thin layers works best), dry, put in water, apply. Sounds easy? That's because it is, it's just slightly laborious ;)

Top picture is the ligther I bought for 1,69eur at a local store in Holland. It's quite practical but also quite ugly as you can see. So I sanded it completely, and then made a nice picture with various CD covers from my one of my favourite bands (middle picture below). I printed the picture on water slide decal paper and applied it to the lighter, you can see the result on the bottom left and right.



The same technique was used to produce a bunch of giveaways for the tUM compos last weekend, and hopefully I'll find the time to do the same for other parties to come :)

Awesome. Thanks again for bringing them as prizes for tUM!

It was my pleasure, I hope people liked the items they got and that there were no problems with functionality etc (if there are, just let me know and I'll fix it :)). Here's the ones of which I made pictures before driving to Griesheim:



Sadly I don't have any of the completed Rewired and tUM petrol lighters anymore, I could make new ones ofcourse but first I have so many other ideas... :)

That's cool! :)

Looks cool. How long does that last?

On cups and other pottery, it's lifelong dishwasherproof if applied correctly.

On metal and plastics I can't find statistics, so the next step is to add an extra layer of protective (heatshrink) foil for heavy use objects that I'm planning. Varnish does a pretty good job too by itself though, so only time will tell if the extra layer is overkill :)

Those tUM prizes were pretty nice :)

I had no luck with the ones i made about a year ago.
Yours look cool, the ones i made looked like a child had stickered the dishes. and even after the "Einbrennvorgang" it didn't last long.

saga musix, thanks! it's really nice to hear people liked them :) i was too late to make the prizegiving so i have no idea how the people who got that stuff liked their items :/

rbr, thanks! my first attempts probably weren't much better, but once i got the hang of it results started to improve real quickly. if you want i'd be happy to show you what i know at the next party (revision or smth), i'm seriously considering to bring my equipment over for some live decal action anyway :)

keep a workshop! i'd be interested too!

nosfe, i'd be all up for some type of open workshop, doing a lecture would feel odd at my current experience level, but doing it on the spot to show how it works sounds like good fun. only thing that would need to be arranged is some space to do the varnishing, that's toxic so would we;d definitely need to arrange with the orgos :)

looks pretty cool!

thanks! tonight i made the first experiments with applying polyolefin coating. the (shit cheap) polyolefin bags i'm using are sized for remote controls, so it takes some fiddling around with scissors and glue to apply them right, but it seems to be possible to achieve a much better scratch resistance this way. the biggest problem appears to be applying glue without getting too much dirt attached to it, which is not that easy in my workshop atm ;)

Cool, I'd take one ;) Not that I'd smoke, but I have more KMFDM albums on my shelf than any other music together... and wardrobe full of KMFDM shirts.. heh.

something different this time, i made some coffeecups for the youth camp i help organise every summer, here's a halfdecent picture considering it was taken with my crap chinaphone:


jPV, the KMFDM gas lighter design is on the shelf for now, I'm waiting for a better sanding machine to arrive so it doesn't take me half an hour to clear the paint from each new one. There's a very big chance I'll do some more of these and/or other KMFDM related objects, I'd be happy to let you know if I have any left over and we can perhaps work out a swap, I'm always looking for obscure beers and liquors to try out :)

OK so here is a picture of the zippo lighters I made for this weekend's Payback demoparty in Helsinki:

And here's a pic of the Rewired zippos that I also made for Payback (and previously for tUM):

I don't know who ended up receiving these items but would welcome any comments :)

not a waterslide though...

Laser engraved I'd guess? I can't see any lines that seem to indicate foil or stickering, if it is something like that it's a really nice job (better than I can make at this point)

Not intending to derail, but laser etched stuff would be cool. So far I've stuck to making things from wood or acrylic not already part of something else. For one, depending on what you're etching, you only get one shot ... and secondly, I'm not really the kind of person to "art up"(/artify?) my stuff. Maybe if people ask for more compo prize stuff :P havoc seems to have an "in" here. :) (Go, go!)

Though on that note, I've seen a rotary "attachment" for the laser cutter at the space I use and they've etched wine glasses and a fairly plain beer stein/mug (something closer to this; as a test piece) and they came out pretty well. Though it's a bit hard to go all the way around on the mug because the handle hits the attachment/floor when you rotate the other way.

I dunno, maybe party decals on a drinking glass sends the wrong message ... :P

Not got a laser yet, it's just engraved, probably 0.1mm deep. The brass underneath the chrome shows up really nicely on Zippos.

As for one shot, yeah, there's another program to cut a jig out every time I do a Zippo, so it's perfectly aligned with the cutter head, bit of a waste of (scrap) wood unless you do several at a time, but it's the only way to make it come out right...

AMcBain, for sure, laser engraving offers some really nice possibilities. I think the best Outline promo item we ever ordered from a factory were aluminium bottle openers about 5 years ago (yay for politically incorrect party gifts, we also did cigarette lighters and beermats, glasses sound way cool too ;)). Those openers were quite cheap and simple, powder coated aluminium things, by far the smallest promo item we ever had, but it's also the item that actually gets used most frequently- recently a fairly wellknown scener asked me for a new one because the "tooth" on his original opener had actually worn off after years and years of almost daily use :)))

You're absolutely right about the design aspect, that's more important/interesting to me than really inventing/making new products. Whatever ideas I've had for techniques like engraving and 3d printing is always in support of my 2d graphics stuff. I've seriously considered purchasing a small 3d printer but what's holding me back is that I'd basically just buy it to make versions of the items I now buy from the pound store in a shape more suitable to stick 2d gfx on. But such items can also be ordered ready made from specialized printable items suppliers, it's not as cheap as the pound store but I'd be a few hundred items deep before the budget for a 3d printer pays itself back, that's just not very economical. And to be honest, it's quite gratifying to make these things and be able to just hand them out because the material value in it is never above 1 or 2 euros, the real value is in the work that I did, not in some expensive machine I bought ;)

FunGas, cool stuff, you're making these at home or work or somewhere else? I hadn't really thought of "normal" engraving so far but when I see this I'm pretty sure I should :)

havoc: every time i see that bottle opener (which is on my key ring so i see it often) i think "must visit outline" :) Perfect promo item I reckon.

Re. the 3d printer: you could print stamps which print your 2d art. A printed printer!

havoc,
I have a 3D printer coming sometime this spring (OpenBeam Kossel Pro, if you want to look it up) that I'll have to assemble. I didn't do it because I have anything particular in mind ... but some people I know are interested in using it. If I ever finally completed my desire to buy my own laser cutter,* that wouldn't be terribly economical (given current lack of requests for stuff) but I'd probably get some return, and certainly save on at least gas (petrol) I use to get where I go now. To me it's more for the fun, as long as I'm relatively responsible in my budgets otherwise.

* ᵂʰᵉᶰ ᴵ ᵍᵉᵗ ᶦᵗ, ᵖᵉᵒᵖᶫᵉ ʷᶦᶫᶫ ᵏᶰᵒʷ⋅ ᴵ'ᶫᶫ ᵇᵉ ᵗᵒᵒ ᵉˣᶜᶦᵗᵉᵈ ᶠᵒʳ ᵃᶰʸᵒᶰᵉ ᶰᵒᵗ ᵗᵒ⋅

shapeways can do nice 3D prints too, but I think you probably included them in your broad reference of things more expensive than the dollar store. To me the their benefit is really only in the materials I can't do myself, and handling of logistics (sales and shipping) if I ever had anything I wanted to be publicly buyable (and indeed I do, but I'm waiting to see how the sample I bought turns out). If you put a markup on a shapeways model it's almost money for nothing. (There was time spent making the model and buying test samples, of course.)

Havoc - they're homemade.

Buy a small CNC machine, (I have a 6040) a 3D printhead kit is only another 70 Euro.