Colour towers and purging

[dbrandwood 0]

I have a (now dead) CR-X printer which printed the two colours great (well, with not many issues) however, as I said, it's now deceased. In it's place I bought a Geeetech A10M (don't laugh, I regret it but that's another story) Anyone who's owned one will tell you it's a complete cow for jamming. If you're printing a dual colour print that changes colour very often things work okay but if you want to print a dual colour print where it's quite some time before the second colour is required you'll find that the first colour has crept up bowden tube of the second extruder, cooled and set rendering the second colour inoperative as it can't feed. What I think may cure my problem is if I could print both colours in the tower on each layer, Say extruder one on an outer ring and extruder two on an inner ring. Yes, it would waste a good amount of filament but just may cure the issue with the A10M jamming as the colours would both be used regularly and swapped throughout the print, is this possible and if so how?

[Slashee_the_Cow 300]

3 hours ago, dbrandwood said:

I bought a Geeetech A10M (don't laugh, I regret it but that's another story)

Well I didn't know I was supposed to laugh. I'll go look up this thing.

 

Anyway: I've never enjoyed the wonders of a multi-extruder printer (I'm not sure you can get any, or any worth having, in my price range), but I don't think Cura has anything built in that can do this.

 

It could probably be done in a post-processor (maybe just make it print another prime tower every layer which is just to keep the second filament used) or in a plugin but I don't know of any which already exist which do it.

[Cuq 202]

In this case, I think , you can choose to use the second extruder for the infill. In this way, the 2 colors are used in each layer, and theoretically the second color is not visible if the number of walls is sufficient.

Edited December 19, 2023 by Cuq

[dbrandwood 0]

Hmm, not a perfect solution but a sound idea, as a stop-gap it might just work, a bit fiddly modelling but something worth a shot at.

[GregValiant 1,277]

Another thing would be to bring in a small model (a cube would work) and make it as tall as the first model then set it to E2.  That would be another way to get both extruders working.

I suppose a post processor could send the nozzle to the middle of the prime tower and just purge some filament.  It wouldn't put any plastic down in layers, but the second extruder would get regular exercise.