Everybody loves vibrant 3D prints, however no one loves prime towers, “printer poop” and all of the plastic waste related to most multi-material setups. Over time, there’s been no scarcity of individuals making an attempt to provide you with a greater manner, and now it’s time for [Roetz] to toss his hat into the ring, together with his patent-proof, open-source Roetz-Finish. You’ll be able to see it work within the video beneath.
The Roetz-Finish is, as you may guess, a hot-end that [Roetz] designed to facilitate directional materials printing. He makes use of SLM 3D printing of aluminum to create a four-in-one hotend, the place 4 filaments are enter and one filament is output. It’s co-extrusion, however within the hot-end and never the nozzle, as is extra usually seen. The stream popping out of the new finish is unmixed and has 4 distinct colored sections. It’s like making bi-colour filament, however with two extra colors, every aligned with one attainable course of journey of the nozzle.
What you get is ‘directional materials deposition’: which color finally ends up on the outer perimeter will depend on how the nozzle is transferring, similar to with bi-color filaments– although way more reliably. That’s nice for making cubes with distinctly-coloured sides, however there’s extra to it than that. Printing at an angle can get neighboring filaments to combine; he demonstrates how properly this mixing works by producing a gradient at (4:30). The color gradients and mixtures on extra difficult prints are pleasant.
Is it an MMU alternative? Not as-built. Maybe with one other axis– both turning the hot-end or the mattress to regulate the course of circulate fully, so the colors might combine nevertheless you’d like, we might name it such. That’s mentioned within the “patent” part of the video, however has not but been carried out. This system additionally isn’t going to interchange MMU or multitool setups for individuals who wish to print dissimilar supplies for easily-removable helps, however co-extruding supplies like PLA and TPU on this machine creates the likelihood for some fascinating composites, as we’ve mentioned earlier than.
As for being “patent-proof” — [Roetz] believes that via publishing his work on YouTube and GitHub into the general public area, he has put this out as “prior artwork” which ought to block any entity from efficiently submitting a patent. It labored for Robert A. Heinlein with the waterbed, however that was a very long time in the past. Time will inform if it is a option to revive open {hardware} in 3D printing.
It’s definitely a neat concept, and we thank [CityZen] for the tip.
