Transcript:
Okay. I’m going to start off this video with a quick clip of the cheap Chinese printer printing in three colors. If you want to watch the print from start to finish, I will provide a link to that video in the link down below. Now, I have to give a big shout-out to Michael’s the reuleaux. He helped me get the firmware working on the printer and that’s how. I was able to make this happen. So thanks, Michael. And here we go cross our fingers and hope that this works. It’s just so many Auto leveling routine and it’s about ready to print now. I usually have to kind of help it right here When it’s doing the outline, assume that Mr Gordon resulted yeah. We have a third printing. We’re just starting to print the yellow color. And I’m getting good better. He is thanks to the glue stick. Now let’s talk about the file while this is happening here in the print preview, we can see. I have these three blocks, yellow, clear and blue, and those are all just part of my file that actually sent. So there is a setting in repetier-host with secure engines for a wipe and Prime Tower. Now that is meant to clean the novel between when you have two different novels, you physically have to not a single model like I have. Okay, so that’s not adhering with that, so I need to go back to my old so it was stable. Let it go! It’s got a little peel up off the bed. There is all said it might stick back down, so this one. I don’t know if you heard that little grinding with these extruders have a little bit of little quit having a point stool. They’re a little bit less torquing, and I needed a larger steppers for that, So it looks like I’m getting peeling on that tower as well. I need to start this print over again. Let’s just let it run out of clothes here for a few minutes and see what happens so that queer should be ready to go and again. I got terrible, beneficial manner, so that was a pleasure would be unacceptable, but the whole point of that little square is just to kind of prime the novel to clear out the yellow color and to get it to get it all clear so anyway, back to what I was saying, I had to make these three blocks in my CAD program, and then I had to figure out where it situates and turns out they need to be situated in front, and then the slicing software will print them first before it prints my actual part, not behind there, so this mode where I’m going to keep running with it. No, of course, the last layer would be the one. The champ done. Alright well. Nobody sent reliever to cool before. We pop it off, okay, well. This is a cooling down, lets. Take a look at it. This is the transition block where transitions between blue to yellow so that blew and went back together. This is the transition block where with transition from yellow to clear, and this was the one from blue or from clear blue, so this one looks very bluish, because there’s no other colors natural, and it was kind of shame from success. Hey, printing in three colors on a cheap Chinese printer. Now I just went on eBay and priced out all of the components for this and it can do right around two hundred and seventy-five dollars, so that is darn cheap for multi material and multicolor 3d printing. But it’s not perfect, So let’s talk about that. I started out with this design here now. This this part here is all Joseph’s persona. I just downloaded these components. We printed them up, but everything from here and below. It mostly is except for this tab, which is something. I added to receive the distance. Proximity sensor for the z-axi’s. Everything from that line and up is geometry that I created now. This first version used this pipe fitting up here to receive the Teflon tube of the Bowden set up. This pipe fitting has the narrow threads. You can see those right there and its chunk. Don’t use these. If you see a design with these shy away from it, the reason is with the narrow threads, there’s a lot of internal features inside of that hole and the filament temp they caught on those features and it’s very frustrating to use as a side note. If you find designs with this type of pipe fitting with the much wider diameter on the threads, you’ll be okay. This works just fine so to get away from those pipe fittings. This was the solution. Now you can see these pockets here, and they receive four millimeter nuts, and then the Teflon tube is threaded into those nuts. I wish I had thought of this technique. It’s very clever, but I will link the video in the description below where I saw this technique and copied it. What you can see here is the three filament feeds all joining into a single feed that goes down into your hot end, and we’re going to talk about that here in a second because we need to talk about this now. This is your hot end. There’s the radiator and this is your throat. This is made out of stainless steel right here at this end is where the heat is. That’s where your heater block fits and there’s a melt chamber right here where you have a big glob of molten plastic now as you feed the filament back through as you’re pulling it back through that big glob of molten plastic, it’s squeezed through an orifice inside of here and that orifice is two millimeters wide, so the filament hardens it gets cool. After it’s pulled through there so becomes two millimeters run and have to feed back through in exactly two millimeter orifice shouldn’t be a problem, except that that’s an ideal case And, of course, the real world is never ideal. Let’s look at a piece of filament That’s been pulled through there and you can see. Is that bulbous end now? I’ve put my calipers on it. And it does indeed measure two millimeters, but you can see that it’s kinked. Not only is a kink. There’s this hair, this long, stringy portion of the filament. Now, for a sort of worse example, lets. Look at this section of clear. You can see this. This looks terrible. You see the kink, and you see all the those stringy hairs. You see some yellow, and you see some that are clear. And why is this a problem? Well, it’s supposed to fit back through a two millimeter orifice, but what ends up happening is the kink gets in the way it’s kind of kinked, so can’t get through there and these hairs all get folded up and around like so, and then you’re trying to shove, folded, hairy, kinked filament back through a two millimeter orifice, and that doesn’t work so would not be a problem. Maybe would not be a problem if the film that we’re not kinked, so what? I was worried about was that in this design that sharp corner, even though I put that little fill it on it. Those words at that sharp corner was the problem, causing the kick. So I came up with this geometry here and printed it up and then what this is. If it has the from up here at the top all the way down there, it’s a single radius, so it’s a nice, smooth transition. There’s no place where the filament should be able to get kinked and it worked. It’s all the problem. No, ha ha! This is the filament that just got pulled out of the printer, right. After that successful print bit, you can see, and there is a kinked end on the on the filament and not only that you can see all the hairs all those all the strings so problem now. I’ve researched and I’ve looked at professional options for Splitters, 2-way 3-way splitters and any splitters, which feed into a single hot end. That’s not a mixing novel now. If it’s a mixing novel, you won’t have this problem. But if it’s if it feeds into a single hot end, and you’re retracting molten filament back past that orifice, you’re going to have this problem, how do you solve it? I haven’t found a professional solution that I can copy, so I’m kind of having to invent something, and this is what I’ve come up with. So this is the add actual part that we were just now printing with. Well, you can see. Is these little round things here? Those are Springs. And if I push on them, you can see that that bottom right there. The bottom corner sort of lifts out and the bolt is the pivot point there. So these two bolts and what’s going on there? I’m gonna have to simulate this with my hands. Pretend that my thumbs are holding the filament, so let me just put a piece of filament there, right, so my thumbs are holding the filament like. So if you pull the foeman up my thumbs lock in, so it’s squeezing the filament, but if you push the filament down my thumb spread open and the filament see is a feed through, so my thumbs represent that gap, and I’ve set that gap to be one point Eight eight millimeters. So as you’re feeding this bulbous end through from the top, you won’t have a problem. That’s my thumbs or the the geometry will move out of the way, but as you feed it as you pull it back through, it locks my thumbs together and locks them at that one point eight eight millimeter distance and hopefully this end is still soft enough that it can be shaped to be smaller than one point well than two millimeters, it would be down to one point eight eight millimeters and then once we’re shoving back through all the string ease, the string is plus the bulbous end that’s not squeezed down to one point. Eight eight millimeters will hopefully be small enough to fit through that orifice, so unfortunately, it didn’t work. It didn’t work here. I think I need to make these. Springs more robust or maybe the filament just is not soft enough by the time it gets all the way up there like. I said it needs to happen way down here. It needs to need this. Sort of pinching techniques needs to occur right there at the orifice down in the metal. But that’s not something that I’m willing to do when I have the option of a mixing Melville, which is a far better solution, so the whole point of this is to try to do it for under $300 and I don’t think that it’s ever going to be as good as a mixing novel not only because of this problem, but because of this. Well, here’s your priming blocks and you can see how much plastic? I wasted to print this. This little tiny part. And this is the wasted plastic. They have to just get tossed in the trash, just so that you can get a true color, so you can cycle out all the old color. With mixing novels. The melt chamber is much smaller, the actual, like part, where the three filaments come together, so mixing novels are a much better solution, so that’s it for this video. Its number five in this series is on modifying cheap. Chinese 3d printers and really, it’s the fifth video on this channel, a branding channel. And I’m doing. I’ve got a lot of exciting things coming up, so you’ll want to subscribe. Hit that button down below. I will continue to work on this cheap Three-color 3d printing technique, But I’m also going to get the brass hot end for the for the diamond hot end in the mail that’s coming and so the next video, I should have that one up and operational, which will be pretty cool, but after that I’m going to hope that I can solve the kinked filament problem and get this working so that we can all have a ranger dollar three color printer. Okay, so thanks for watching.