Ever heard of inkjet printable shrinking plastic?  I hadn't.

Followers of the blog will know I've got an obsessive refusal to use paper or card on Wednesford, which can be affected by temperature and damp.  This has led me to over-use the 3d printer to produce signage but it doesn't work well in all cases, plus is useless for advertising hoardings.  Whilst looking to see if you could still get inkjet printable overhead projector acetate in the Powerpoint era (you can as it happens) I discovered something new to me: plastic card you can print on, then apply heat (either in the oven or by heat gun) to shrink down by two thirds, during which it bulks up to about 1mm-2mm thick.  It's used extensively by crafters who make custom badges and jewellery items with it.  It has drawbacks - the heating process causes it to curl which can cause small thin items to fuse, and it darkens colours significantly, but you can seal the inkjet print with a sealant after cooking to preserve any image and once cool, can be cut although if you are doing any complex shapes, it is probably best to cut prior to baking.

So, I bought a pack to try, it costs about £3 a sheet but I thought it worth a try.  

First two attempts were a full A4 sheet which I thought might be better to reduce the risk of curling but they didn't work out.  It doesn't like being baked as a single sheet, too many internal stresses cause differential shrinkage and warping.  So on the third attempt, I cut the sheet into smaller sections.  Smaller pieces seem to curl less, which is odd as I had read that small items curl up onto themselves.  However the smaller sections worked better, and the test bake showed I had got the scale right in my drawings which I had prepared in Paint Shop Pro. The items were placed immediately from the oven between two sheets of glass to cure which also reduced warping.  The cured plastic cuts well with sharp scissors so craft knives should pose no problem.  It's best to cook in small batches so you can immediately whip them between two sheets of glass to cure flat, the plastic sets very quickly but should cure flat if you place them between two flat plates with a weight on top.

Took three attempts to get it to work satisfactorily but I can see many uses for this stuff. Station totems, advert hoardings, shops can have nice colourful fascia signs and despite what U2 think, the streets can all have names. Game changer product in my view, which I've never seen mentioned anywhere on any model railway forums.  Takes some trial and error to get right but can be made to work.

Interestingly, when I found this product, and having quite a few arty-crafty friends, I put out an all points bulletin on Faceache to see if others had any experience of this product.  Apparently it's been around some time, but had passed me by.  Judging by the lack of comment on this or other forums I suspect it has also passed the wider model railway community by too.  However, as a durable, reasonably easy to use replacement for card or paper signage, I'm a convert and will be investing in a second pack so I can do a whole raft of adverts and signs and scale back the over reliance on 3d printed signage.

I'll do some photos of the first non-test print later, together with the failed prints, for you to have a look at and see for yourself the potential for this stuff.