3D Printing Building your own 3D color printer - advice

misiozol

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I just wanted to make a 3d color printer, but I do not know how to do it and I did not want to spend a fortune on something that stands and so it collects dust, I found the motherboard that is suitable for it is Rumba+ , and extruder in the shape of a diamond, I found all the items on ali, I would prefer some help because maybe there are better options, have found something like the picture the cost of it is 350e , and that is my goal on how it should look if I counted correctly parts should be less than half of 350e . Will be used just for fun and printing mostly some junk :D

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My biggest advice would be to NOT buy a delta printer if you want any sort of quality output. Whilst delta printers (like the one in your picture) are faster than i3 or cartesian printers they lack the stability of any other type of 3d printer and so cannot compete when it comes to quality.

You can get a cheap 3d printer kit for around £150 fully complete (a build it yourself kit) and then add the parts to make it multi colour. Something like the Anet a6, a8 or a10, all very good printers and cheap. You can get any number of cheap Prusa i3 clones ether as kits or pre-built and then add a multi colour kit to those.

There are an absolute ton of 3d printer vids on youtube I would watch a good few before buying a printer, you will get a much more wide and varied set of reviews. I would recommend 3D Printer Nerd, Makers Muse, 3D Printing Noob, Thomas Sanladerer, they all have good reviews of many printers including cheap and expensive kits as well as multi colour 3d printing.

As it stands at the moment printing multi coloured object is more of a bind than useful and unless you spend mega bucks on a printer that handles it well you'll be ripping your hair out in no time.

Personally I went the other way and started off with a dual nozzle (2 colour) printer and turned it into a single colour printer because of issues getting both nozzles right. But multi colour through 1 nozzle is better in that respect but you have multiple other issues, like if you use different brands of filament they will be set to melt at different temperatures and there may be a lot of heating up/cooling down time with a single hotend, there is a lot of waste as each time you change colour you have to purge the previous one. The 3 extruders have to be set to the correct speeds for the filament they are using or you'll get under/over extrusion.
 
Hmm... OK but if i use 1 extruding head and change color I do not have to purge do i ?
 
Hmm... OK but if i use 1 extruding head and change color I do not have to purge do i ?

Yes you do because when you remove the first colour there is always some left melted in the hotend. It's the main way these multi colour single nozzle 3d printers work. They print a small tower on the bed to change colours.

Even if you only use 1 hotend and 1 extruder (like 90% of 3d printers) and you physically change the filament you'll still have to get rid of the melted stuff in the nozzle as it doesn't all come out when you retract the filament.

If you have a printer with more than 1 extruder and hotend then you do not need to purge as colours are changed. There are plenty of printers that use 2 nozzles but not many that use more then 2.
 
But still it's possible to anticipate how much filament and just change color in one extruder ?
 
But still it's possible to anticipate how much filament and just change color in one extruder ?

If you are using just 1 extruder the slicer software can be set to pause the printing whilst you change colours, but there will still be a need to purge out the old colour. But this also means you can only change colour on a full layer basis.

There is a device that is external to the printer and uses a special system to feed up to 4 colours into 1 extruder in just the right amounts to make a continuous single filament going to the hotend.

It's very expensive though, but can handle multicolours on each layer.
 
What's it called ?

The device is called "Pallette" and is a kickstarter by a company called "Mosaic Manufacuring" it takes up to 4 different filaments, they can be different types too eg PLA, ABS, Nylon etc.. and combines them in to 1 stream that is then fed to your 3d printer. Thus turning any 3d printer with 1 hotend into a multi colour multi material machine.

The drawback is that the earlybird special (which has all gone) was $599 and the normal price is $849 or $999 with filament feeder.

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