 Are you looking to get into the sublimation game? So are we, and we think we found the easiest, cheapest, fastest way to get started. We converted this Epson Eco Tank Printer and made a whole project in less than 90 minutes and we'll show you how we did it right now. What is up? Welcome back. Do you like to do it, Builder or Make It? So do we, and we have a new video each week. This week, we're replacing an old friend. Our sublimation printer has died. Yes, we're looking to make a new project this week. I wanted to show you some cool things so we could do with some sublimation, some cool techniques that we learned. So we pulled out our printer, got ready to start testing for this project. Good putt. It's not working. So we thought if you've been interested in sublimation and you haven't had to purchase your own printer yet, I wanted to show you what I think is the easiest, most affordable way to get into the sublimation game. I'm serious. This is going to be so easy. This little printer, we got the base model here. It's only $250, so not too expensive and $20 worth of ink to convert it. And you can start sublimating and creating all kinds of fancy projects and the one we're going to show you how to do today. Step one, we're going to gather all of our supplies. We need a sublimation printer, some sublimation paper, some sublimation ink, a heat source to set the sublimation, something to put the sublimation on, and some MDF, and some laminate sheets, some thermal, what are they? Thermal laminating pouches. Some thermal laminating pouches. And of course, we'll have all the links to all of these items. You can get everything here on Amazon and all the links will be down below. That is it, right? Yeah, I think that's it. All right. Step two, convert your printer. Actually, convert sounds like such a harsh word for what little work we're going to do to set this printer up to make it a sublimation printer. Yeah, I wouldn't even say convert. It's definitely just set it up as a sublimation printer. Yeah, brand new, right out of the box. We're just going to open it up. I'm going to open it up. Now they give us ink with the printer, but we don't need this ink. We just need the caps, I think. I see a lot of people just dumping this ink out into cups and then pouring the sublimation ink into these bottles to fill it up. And I'm going to try to skip that step. Because the purpose of this bottle, it does have a special cap so that you can't put the wrong ink into the wrong... What is it? Container? Well, yeah. So tank? Tank, yes, tank is what it's... So there's special caps so that you can't put the wrong ink into the wrong tank. Each one has, like, a special key so that it fits. But that's all that you need is the key so that you can press it down. So what we think we're going to do, yes, is take the lid off, take the lid off of our sublimation. Well, got to remove the little... Oh. Jim here. Pro tip, wear gloves. This stuff does stand and it will stay there for a couple of days. All right, we're going to open it up. We're going to pop open the top of the tank. We're going to see if our little key fits in there. There's the key fit and the key fits. So it has no ink in the tanks yet. We're just, instead of putting printer ink, we're going to put the sublimation ink. All right, let's see if this works. Now I'm just going to take this tip, put it in there and dump the ink in. Now it doesn't fit. Let's see if I can squeeze it. Does it fill it up? I think it's filling up. You have me tilt it towards you? Oh, no, it's filling up. Yeah, yeah, we're good. I'm just going to keep squeezing it in the top a little bit. Do you know? Just keep squeezing a little bit. Get a little bit of squeezing. It's going to take a little blank. Well, it looks like it'll fill up whatever this giant bottle is. So the tank must be large for black. Let me save that last little drip. Look at that. Look at that. Well, I would have wiped it out. There's a difference between me and you, Kim. Start here so I hit OK. Press OK. On the next screen, press and hold the question help button for three seconds. Then I say start. When the message to start initialization appears on the LCD screen, press the start button to start charging the ink. Ink charging takes approximately 10 minutes. A message appears when ink charging is complete. We follow the instructions on the Getting Started card, which led us to this website. And then we just followed all of the prompts. We're going to make all of our cuts. Going to bring this quarter inch MDF over to the glow forge and cut it out. Well, the printer is doing its thing. I already painted these white earlier, so I'm just going to mask it off, throw it in the glow forge and cut out our design. And if you don't have a glow forge and you can't cut this yourself, we are offering this as a new kit in our store. It's part of the reason why we're making this project. We're going to do it for the July theme, but I think you could do other themes to go with it as well. And we're going to sublimate. We're just going to use this A sub sublimation paper. We're going to throw it in the printer we just set up and we're going to head over to the computer and print out our images. Remember, mirror your images. Now ours don't really need to be mirrored. We're going to use a pattern, but if you want to use something that you'll be able to tell if it's front or back or reversed or forward. Writing, yeah. It's got writing on it. You definitely want to mirror your image. Okay. Everything's printed. Everything is cut. Now it's time to actually sublimate on our MDF. Now this is where our trick comes in. So if you're new to sublimation, sublimation works on anything with a polyester coating. So you can purchase lots of things with a polyester coating. You can have t-shirts. You can have mugs. Yeah. Yeah. Mugs. We have this little pouch here that you can sublimate on. I mean, they make like all kinds of sublimation blanks. That's what you're looking for. Sublimation blanks. Yes. Well, we couldn't find sublimation blanks in the shape of the letters that we wanted and in the size. So we're going to make our own right now using some laminate sheets. So this is our little hack for this one. So we're going to use regular old MDF letters. There is no polyester on them. We did show you a trick with... The dry erase. Yeah. The dry erase or the melamine. But we heard a lot of people can't find the dry erase or the melamine. So if you can't, here's another trick we learned and I thought it would be a really cool tip to show you guys. It's these laminating pouches. I guess you can get sheets, but it was a lot easier to find the pouches. And we're just going to rip it in half. So what we're going to do is we're going to laminate or heat transfer these lamination pouches or these sheets now onto the letters. And that's going to give it the coating that will allow the sublimation ink to take. So the first thing we're going to do is heat transfer this paper onto this letter. Do you want a little pat? Yeah, we need some butcher paper so that it will stick to the heating source or heat press and it won't stick to our mat. We're going to stick a piece of butcher paper down, a shiny side up. Stick our laminate down. And then another piece of butcher paper, a shiny side down. Now we're just going to press it for 60 seconds at 385 degrees. And like a little bit of pressure. That's hot and stuck. We'll set that over there for now. We'll turn that out in a second. We'll just do all of the letters right now. So we got a W, bring and use printer paper so you don't use up a whole bunch of paper. And the last one, look they look all vacuum packed. This thing will stay fresh forever. Now it's time to unseal our letters. Just trim them out. We need some kind of mat so we don't mess up our very clean table. We're just going to run around the edge with the razor blade. Just keep it tight. What is it? Laminating sheets on them. Yeah, they have the laminating sheets on them. I don't know if you guys can see my corner. It's a little peeled up right there, just a little bit. Not even worried about it. I'm going to hit it with the heat again when we go to sublimate it. I'm going to go and sublimate it. I think it's time. I think it's time. All right, back to sublimation. All right, put your paper down. Letter down. We're going to start with W. All right, W is getting this, like this. Uh-oh. Getting this. I guess it's going to have to. I wanted stars on top, stripes on the bottom, but it's too wide for it to be vertical. So I'm going to make it... Yeah, so it hangs off a little bit. So we're just going to turn it sideways. It'll work. I think it'll work, Kim. It'll be fine. I'm going to go stars heavy though, right? Quick tip. Hit your sublimation piece, your blank, with a little bit of easy tack. And then you don't have to really worry about that. I can actually hit it. Because if your sublimation paper moves at all with the heat source on it, it'll have a ghosting effect. Yes. So you definitely do not want that. No, no, no. Yeah, what was I doing? This way. Yes. We're going to mess it up before we get it started. See, now I shouldn't have any ghosting. See how everything moves with it? Should be good to go. I'm going back in 385 for 60 more seconds. Okay. Oh, do I need another butcher piece? Yes, I do. Oops, sorry. I wasn't paying attention. Butcher piece. 60 seconds, 385. Go. Let's see how it did. Whoa, look at that. That came out a lot better than I thought. I missed the corner there. Yeah, give it a second. Give it a second. I'll stick this over here. So we picked this particular pattern because it has a wood grain in it and it's shift-lap. So it should really show you what sublimation can do. Yeah, there's no way I'd be able to paint this kind of detail. Yep, I think that's the L. Do I need to get a different piece of butcher paper, you think? Nah, that's just waste anyway. Oh, spray tack. You just need a tiny little squirt. 385, 60 seconds. You can really see the wood grain in that one. It came out tight. Yeah, give it a little step by. Now we paint. We're going to paint all of the MDF pieces that didn't get sublimated on. So not painting. Painting. We're going to use our Country Chic paint because that stuff goes on with one coat. Yes, and the great thing about this is if you want to try this Country Chic paint, you know, you can get them in our store. But what I was going to share is that they come in this cute little medium starter kit. We have these in our store and happen to have this red, white, and blue color palette. So this is like the perfect project to start with. Paint the town red, star struck blue, and simplicity white. So they all come in one little box kit. So a little sponge and everything. Perfect starter palette. Gold looks fine. Okay, so we're going to make this a door hanger. If you can kind of see here, I've got these vertical and they're going to hang vertically. They could go on a front porch welcome sign, a vertical welcome sign with the two pickets. But for this one, I wanted it to because we were sublimating on them and I'm not really sure how this will handle outside. I thought I could do this on a ribbon, mount them to a ribbon and then hang them indoors. And so I chose this ribbon here, which is great. And can you see it's got the red, white and blue stars on it and it's burlap. And so I think it works perfectly with a theme. But what I think doesn't work is I chose the gold letters thinking I would give this a pop. But now I think the gold letters look too muted. I should have just stuck with the simplicity from the kit that I mentioned earlier, but I didn't. I was going to mix it up. So now I'm going to go back and paint them white so that it really makes, it really matches and makes the white in this ribbon pop. So let me do that real quick. A six and now we assemble it. We're just going to glue down the little letters to the stars. And then we're going to glue all of the letters and the stars to the ribbon, right? Yeah. That's it. We're going to use this Gorilla Glue gel to glue the letters to the stars and then we're going to hot glue the stars to the ribbon and the letters. And actually I wanted to share with you so he has this Gorilla Glue. But on one of the groups out there, I found the recommendation of using this Starbond. It is this it's like a super glue and we've been using this a lot with our MDF. So I recommend this Starbond multi-purpose medium. I enjoy that stuff too. I just like the the gelness of this glue. Well, that's interesting because I just ordered Starbond thick. Oh, so it's a jelly. Yes. So I haven't tried it yet, but it's on its way. So we'll try it then. Let you know how that works out. And I'll come through with a staple. Do you know how big these staples are? I do not. Me either. They won't go all the way through. All right, we're going to lift this thing. Let's do it. Oh, that thing is pretty tall. Pretty tall. You got the rainbow on there. Yes. So I already made myself a little coordinating though. I'm just going to put that right here. Can you? Nope. Nope. Basically the other way. Yeah, I'm going to put it right in. Maybe I need to lay. Maybe we should lay down for me to do that. All right, what do you guys think? Super easy, right? What was that like 90 minutes? We set up the printer, sublimated on something we weren't supposed to sublimate on and created a whole project. 90 minutes. Not bad at all. So what did you think about the conversion of this Eco Tank Epson printer? I wouldn't call it a conversion. Would you? It was super easy. And then with Garrett's little trick of just taking off the cap and squirting the water, the water, the sublimation ink right down in there, there's nothing to it really. You just set it up and it's a new sublimation printer. 250 bucks is super affordable to get into the sublimation game. You can find this sublimation paper like anywhere. I think Walmart carries it. Staples definitely carries it. Office Depot, the laminating sheets. Again, you can find these anywhere. Office Depot, Staples, Amazon, Walmart. You can find everything you need locally or on Amazon. We'll put the links to everything we used down below. And then of course we had, which I don't have over here, just a little reminder, our country sheet paints. If you wanted to get the starter set, this is a great one to start with this red, white and blue. So if you don't have a glow forage and enjoy this kit, head over to the store, pick yourself up one, throw some sublimation on it, show us what you got. But wait, one last thing. I just want to remind you, don't forget to enter into our 60,000 subscriber giveaway. The link will be down below. We're giving away our own pocket saw and brand nailer. So who doesn't want pocket and their very own brand? I mean, imagine the things you could do with it, like everything that we do. You could do with those tools. I will see you next week. Now we're really out of time. So if I'm not going to see you over on Patreon for the after show, I guess I'll have to see you next week. And I really don't have much to balance. I'm not balancing the new printer. So this piece of cardboard right here. Yeah, that's kind of boring, huh?