Use fill as wipe/prime to prevent wipe/prime tower

[jeroen-coulembier 1]

Hello,

Just a thought I had to reduce the need for a wipe/prime tower when using dual extrusion.

Would it be possible to use a different extruder for the fill then for the walls? This way the extruder is allready wiped. Allso the travel between the tower and model are prevented this way since there is no tower.

This will only work for models with enough fill to clean out the nozzle.

I'm also thinking of this because I'm using a single head dual extruder.

Regards,

Jeroen C.

 

[pm_dude 27]

Hi Jeroen,

 

Would it be possible to use a different extruder for the fill then for the walls?

 

I think the time you would waste for waiting for one head to heat up and the other to cool down would massively reduce the potential gain in time one could expect.

 

This way the extruder is allready wiped. Allso the travel between the tower and model are prevented this way since there is no tower. This will only work for models with enough fill to clean out the nozzle.

 

The extruder wont be wiped already. It will need to wipe while its doing the fill and will cause under extrusion when cooling down. What do you do for layers having the top/bottom fill? You can't wipe on those. If you cant wipe on those then you still need the tower to be at the good height for those cases.

In other words you will always need some place outside your model to wipe regardless of the available fill.

 

I'm also thinking of this because I'm using a single head dual extruder.

 

How can single head dual extruder even work?

Are you saying switching filament from one to another above the nozzle and use the same nozzle? Then its worst than wiping. You would need to purge the entire nozzle chamber from the previous filament before starting to print again and that will mean wasting a lot of filament. It would also mean you bring hot filament into the bowden tube which will most likely get stuck in the bowden tube while cooling down,

I might just dont get what you are saying.

 

[jeroen-coulembier 1]

Thanks for the insight. I think maby my pov was to much from my own printer (Big Builder).

My printer has in fact only one head, but dual extrusion. And it works pritty well!

For the bottom and top layers I had the same thought. You still need a wipe tower.

But for some prints like embedded letters it would be an interesting feature.

But seems to me that there are to much conditions (especially single head dual extrusion) to even get a feature like this in the software :-).

Maby I can program it myself? Selecting another extruder for infull can not be so difficult?

It's only the order of printing that seems more difficult to me...

 

[jeroen-coulembier 1]

The best solution would be to allways set the infill in the other color of the wall color.

Many times the bottom and top wall can be one color.

If you imagine the wipe/prime tower to be the infill of an object. Then you gain time and filament!

 

[inventabuild 5]

Hello,

It's been quite a while since you posted your request.  Have you found a slicer that works the best with your plan to prime-with-infill instead of prime-with-a-prime-tower?  It seems to me this functionality is critical to make multi-input single-output nozzles like the e3d Cyclops more efficient time-wise and material-wise.

I have the e3d Cyclops and my print times can more than double when I need to use a prime tower to purge the old color out of the nozzle.  Purging out the old color with infill solves this problem big time.

I'd be interested to know if you found a good way to implement this with a particular slicer or any other way.  Thank you.

Edited March 27, 2016 by Guest