Collaborate Disseminate
Multicolor printing on FDM machines can be tricky to get working flawlessly, and purging hotends when changing colors can end up wasting a lot of filament and material. To solve …read more Continue reading Automated Hotend Swapping For Less Wasteful Multicolor Printing
When it comes to toolchanging 3D printers, idle nozzles tend to drool. Cleaning out that nozzle goo, though, is critical before switching them into use. And since switching nozzles can …read more Continue reading Toolchanging Printers Get a Nozzle Hanky Like No Other
A recent research paper shows a way to create multicolor 3D prints using a single extruder if you are too lazy to babysit the machine and switch filament. The concept: print your own “programmable” filament that has the right colors …read more
Continue reading Programmable Filament for Multicolor Printing
When you zoom in on a fractal you find it is made of more fractals. Perhaps that helped inspire the Harvard 3D printers that have various arrays of mixing nozzles. In the video below you can see some of the interesting things you can do with an array of mixing …read more
Continue reading Multi Material 3D Printing Makes Soft Robot
I admit that I’m late to the 3D printing game. While I just picked up my first printer in 2018, the rest of us have been oozing out beautiful prints for over a decade. And in that time we’ve seen many people reimagine the hardware for mischief besides just printing …read more
Continue reading Jubilee: A Toolchanging Homage to 3D Printer Hackers Everywhere
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
3D printing is cool, but most basic fused deposition printers just print in a single color. This means that if you want a prettier, more vibrant print, you need to paint or perform some other kind of finishing process. Multimaterial printers that can switch filaments on the fly exist, but they often have an issue with waste. [3DMN] decided to attempt building a purge bucket as a solution.
[3DMN] was previously familiar with using a purge block when running multimaterial prints. A basic block model is printed along side the actual desired part. The block is printed so that it …read more
Continue reading Purge Buckets To Help With Multimaterial Printing
First of all, a living hinge is not a biological entity nor does it move on its own. Think of the top of a Tic Tac container where the lid and the cover are a single piece, and the thin plastic holding them together flexes to allow you to reach the candies disguised as mints. [Xiaoyu “Rayne” Zheng] at Virginia Tech designed a method of multimaterial programmable additive manufacturing which is fancy-ese for printing with more than one type of material.
The process works under the premise of printing a 3D latticework, similar to the “FILL” function of a consumer …read more
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
E3D has introduced their latest answer to multimaterial printing at the Midwest RepRap Festival this weekend. Their research project into a 3D printer with the ability to change toolheads is the latest advancement in multimaterial printing. It’s a work of engineering brilliance, and they’ve already written up their teardown on how this all came to be.
While milling machines and other fancy industrial CNC have had tool changing for decades, and the subject has been pursued by the RepRap community for a few years now, it really hasn’t caught on. The question then is, what is tool changing on a …read more