So, with mixer hot-ends, you want to keep PVA flowing through your nozzle as much as possible. If you leave them lingering for too long in a hot nozzle, they will degrade and turn into a crusty mess – clogging your extruder. PVA and similar water-soluble materials are very sensitive to heat. Purge too little, and the residues of support filament will contaminate your model affecting part stability and surface quality in the end.īut one way or another: mixer hot-ends will always produce waste.īesides, using PVA with a mixer hot-end is a challenge on its own. Purge too much and you needlessly waste precious filament. It is a way to clean the nozzle before switching materials and avoid material bleed in your parts.īut getting the right amount to purge can be tricky. Mixer hot-ends require you to print a purge tower with every print job.
So with a device like A10M you could start churning your complex models with supports soon after unboxing.īut before you grab your credit card to order an A10M, you might want to keep learning about some of the drawbacks. No need to fiddle with extruder offsets, which are notorious in systems with two separate nozzles. Nozzle calibration on these machines is straightforward because they use only one nozzle. This price tag is really hard to beat when it comes to something as sophisticated as dual-material 3D printing. So yes, it can print supports too.ģD printers with a mixer hot-end like the Geeetech A10M sell from USD 230. The mixer hot-end acts as a Y-splitter – letting you extrude either support or model material from a single nozzle – without mixing them together. It’s great for mixing colors and creating stunning color gradients in your parts using just two filaments. This mystical creature takes two filaments in, melts them inside, and extrudes a single strand of mixed material. The name says it all: It is a hot-end with two inlets, but only one outlet: the “eye.” In 2014, the legendary 3D printer component manufacturer E3D came out with its “Cyclops” hot-end. Mixer 3D Printers: Lowest Price-Tag But Probably Not the Best Choice for PVA The good news: you can get a decent 3D printer in any of these categories for under $ 1,000.
In general, multi-material FFF technologies can be classified into five categories – each with its own pros and contras when it comes to printing soluble supports.ĭepending on how often you print, what support material you use, and how much you are willing to invest, you might even find the perfect match for your needs. So, which dual extrusion 3D printer is up to the task? But there are also new contestants coming out such as VXL from Xioneer that provide superior performance to PVA.īut printing a support-material combination is not the same as printing two colors of the same filament. Most of them are based on well-known water-soluble polymers PVA and BVOH. But enough users would agree that the true potential of dual-head printers lies in their ability to print soluble supports rather than a palette of colors.Ī quick search on Google reveals dozens of soluble support filaments on the market.
Sure, a model of a four-colored amazon rainforest frog would look great in your 3D printed collection. “ I don’t care about multi-color, I just want soluble supports,” writes a 3D printer user in a forum on dual-material 3d printing. This story was originally published on (see Part 1 and Part 2). Comprehensive guide to 5 low-cost dual-material FFF printing technologies in 2021/2022