Y Adapter filament switching
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With a Y switching system, is the purge length shorter with a Lite6 rather than a E3dv6?
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I think multicolour printing is a novelty which with a switching system soon wears off, and takes 3 times the filament and 8 times the time to print (a mixing hot end seems to perform this function better). I can see the point of printing with soluble support material, but also think a second x carriage with independent z probe is probably the best way to achieve it.
This sums up my experience. I got it working well, got some great looking multicolor prints. Got tired of the headaches from it, and moved back to printing single color prints. The time & headache weren't worth it once the novelty wore off.
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I will add that the Mosaic Pallette+ system looks like a really nice setup if you just want multi-color prints. The results I've seen from it so far look impressive… with apparently a lot less headache. Very expensive, though.
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I'm wondering how reliable this system is… Looks pretty complex.
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@fma:
With a Y switching system, is the purge length shorter with a Lite6 rather than a E3dv6?
Most of my switching was done with a Lite 6. With some color combinations (usually darker colors), the color change was pretty quick. But when I was changing from red to white, it would never print white. It was always pink. I think the largest purge tower I used was 20x20, and it was still printing pink afterwards. That's when I decided filament switching wasn't worth the pain/cost…
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@fma:
With a Y switching system, is the purge length shorter with a Lite6 rather than a E3dv6?
Most of my switching was done with a Lite 6. With some color combinations (usually darker colors), the color change was pretty quick. But when I was changing from red to white, it would never print white. It was always pink. I think the largest purge tower I used was 20x20, and it was still printing pink afterwards. That's when I decided filament switching wasn't worth the pain/cost…
Red to white was always the worst for me, too. I think it took a 30x30 to get it to switch.
That's the transition that got me to thinking about using a purge bucket, and some sort of color sensor….
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Using a purge bucket allows for variable purge length; good idea! Don't know if a color sensor will be accurate enough: not easy to detect such small width. Having a table based on tests should be enough, I think.
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What is this black magic?
I ordered the prometheus heat break and a manual fast pull leaves no strings at all and an almost perfect plug. A slow pull however still strings. I only did 2-3 quick tests so i need more reliability, but how is that done?
Is it the smooth interior surface of the heatbreak so no material can stick on retract? However I dont believe that the stadard e3d heatsink is that much stickier.
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Personally I had months of trouble with a y splitter and an e3dv6, could never get more than around 40 retractions in a row without a failure.
Changed over to a v6 lite, and 10cm of their fancy new blue bowden tube, and have not had a single problem/failure since.
12mm prime tower seems to be enough for me with clear/red petg
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I'm thinking of putting my Y-Splitter upstream of a remote direct drive extruder mounted on my effector (I have a delta) then using secondary extruders to handle the changes and let the RDD to do the precision printing work.
This would allow the long retractions needed for a splitter without the downsides of a Bowden arrangement.
The other thing I'm considering is the prime cup up high, maybe with a wiper on the edge - with a delta, Z is just another direction and Z moves are as quick and accurate as X and Y ones. No need to waste material building layers of a tower with no changes.
Has anybody had any success with either of these ideas?
[edited for spelling and clarification]
