Collaborate Disseminate
There was a time when most of us thought the next logical step for desktop 3D printing was to add additional extruders and hotends, allowing the machine to print in multiple colors or materials. Unfortunately such arrangements quickly become ungainly, and even with just two extruders, calibration can be a …read more
Continue reading External Buffer Boosts 3D Printer Filament Splicing on the Palette 2
The future of 3D printing, it seems, is in multimaterial filament printers. The Prusa I3 multimaterial upgrade exists, and this weekend at MRRF E3D announced their amazing multihead printer. Multimaterial printing will get you mechanical parts with the properties you want, like wheels with grippy treads and strong hubs. It will give you easily removable support material. The most popular use, though, is bound to be multicolor prints. It’s easier to do, as you’re really only working with either ABS or PLA, and if you’re really clever, you can squeeze everything through a single nozzle.
While there are some very …read more
Lots of solutions have been proposed and enacted for multi-color and multi-material 3D printing, from color mixing in the nozzle to scripts requiring manual filament change. A solution proposed fairly early on was to manually splice the filament together, making a custom spool. The printer would print as normal, but the filament would change color. This worked pretty well, but it was tedious and it wasn’t entirely possible to control where the color change happened on the model.
You’ll find some examples of the more successful manual splicing hacks in the pictures below. Scroll down a bit further to find …read more
Continue reading Mosaic Palette: Single Extruder Multi-Color and Multi-Material 3D Printing