Stop oozing

[greengecko 8]

I finished my Dual extrusion upgrade last week. A calibration model and a first photo of a print can be found on youmagine (see signature below).

As it seems from the blog and also from my experience it works great except there is still some oozing that sort of makes the prints a bit messy.

My current idea (which I just tested) is simple.The oozing wall. Basically everytime when there is a change between extruders the noozle has to cross a wall to get rid of the oozing.

An example can be seen in the picture. The quick and dirty solution (especially easy with small prints where you know from which side the swapped noozle will enter the print) is to create protective walls. This worked really well and I had almost no cleaning to do afterwards. The bonus is that it is potentially a software solution that could be integrated in Cura. Instead of having a brim or raft, there could be a selection to have also a wall. The simple version would be to have the skirt drawn upwards so there would be a hull outside of the model, but this needs a lot of time and material is wasted.

A cleverer solution would be the following procedure: at every noozle change the new noozle moves to a predifined wall crossing (wipe tower) and then starts to print. This is maybe only triggered if the noozle was idling more than 5 s (could be a setting in cura) as oozing normally takes some time.

The wipe tower would be printed by both noozles and needs not to be an enormous structure, but maybe quite solid for bigger prints.

Another idea I had (but did not work that good), was to attach an old CD to the frame so it covers a edge of the platform as a permanent wipe tower (would not need to be printed). This worked reasonably well, but needs some more fiddling.

 

[greengecko 8]

Can anyone tell me how to get the youmagine signature to work?

 

[thomass 0]

Very good job.

The wall on the side is a good idea, but you have right, it should be an option in cura.

I will try the wall next time.