Thanks I’ll try them when I get the XY calibrated, also might be a good learning tool for the Great Granddaughter to learn her alphabet.
I still want to know which IDEX printer I should buy or not.
I should rephrase that. If you were buying an IDEX printer today what would you choose and why?
This might sound strange but I might be inclined to wait for the Prusa XL. But, for you, I suspect the price is way out of range: it’s around $2500US for the 2 printhead version (it can go up to 5 printheads).
I would love to hear what everyone thinks of this printer.Multi Color with NO Purge? Articulated Dragon on the Cetus 2 for a First Look! - YouTube
An interesting idea but, as Joel points out, it has some issues. It’s not an IDEX, but it does some things an IDEX can do. I’m not sure I would want 1.
The Sovol SV02 does the same thing it uses one nozzle to print 2 colors. There are a few others that do that too. The only advantage is you can print 2 colors without pausing and switching filaments. You can do that with an IDEX too but you can also duplicate a model as long as it takes less than half the bed width. Will also mirror an image, even though I don’t see much use in that unless you making shoes or something like that. I don’t think the SV04 is a bad printer, I think I just got a bad one. It uses a lot of Creality parts. The new heat plate they sent me was from Creality and was even in a Creality box.
The purge block to me is the big deal.
The Magician does seem to have a little something extra over regular dual-extruder-single-nozzle printers in that it seems to be able to separate the colors better than most. It’s not perfect though, as Joel points out.
I would like to see how it could do with PLA and soluble filament doing a complicated mechanism in one go.
Wow, soluble filament in a Magician. It would be interesting, but I wouldn’t be too hopeful.
I wanted to try some soluble filament but it cost more than PLA and you end up flushing it down the drain.
I think that soluble filament could be used very sparingly if it bonds to PLA as well as they say. It might be interesting to play with using any printer that can do a colour change command.
I’m not sure about Cura, PrusaSlicer, SuperSlicer, IdeaMaker, and others, but Simplify3D has a feature wherein it only uses soluble filament for the part of the supports that is closest to the model. IOW, if a support post is 20mm tall, only the top 1mm to 2mm will be printed with soluble filament, the rest being the regular filament. This saves a huge % of the soluble that would be needed otherwise.
That’s interesting it would sure save a bunch of the soluble filament doing that. I’ll have to check and see if the slicers I use can do that. I know in Prusa you can mark the filament as soluble.
That is very interesting. I finally broke down and purchased some soluble filament and have done one small print for my great-nieces had one failure where the soluble broke loose from the raft. I thought that the small was really too small so now I have doubled the size. A lot of pva filament will be used at $32 for 500kg. Very expensive, but worth it for them. I am using glow in the dark filament but unless you put it under u-v light it doesn’t glow. Another waste. Anyway, the Simplify 3D function sounds great. Maybe someone will do a plugin for Cura.
Further to the discussion on Simplify3D’s support capabilities, it has something called Dense Support Structures. You can see it in action in the photo of a dog model below. The feature allows you to use low density for most of a support, but increase the density close to the model. You specify how many layers of dense support you want. You can see the dense support layers in the photo; they’re quite obvious. In 2017 Simplify3D added the ability to specify which nozzle to use for the dense support. This made it possible to use a different material for dense support: e.g. dissolvable filament.
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Let’s say the dog on the left is red PLA with white PVA support. While the use of lower density for most of the support does reduce the amount of PVA required, it’s still a lot of PVA. PVA is pretty expensive, and it will take quite a bit of water and time to dissolve the support.
On the right, you see the same dog in PLA, but this time most of the support is also made of PLA, which is much cheaper than PVA. Only the last 2 to 3 mm is PVA. This saves a lot of money, and requires much less time and work to dissolve the much smaller amount of PVA.
It is quite possible that the price of Simplify3D (($150US) may be worth it if you’re going to do a serious amount of printing with supports. On amazon.com I found PVA priced @ $40/500g. That would make it $80 for a regular 1kg spool. Since PLA and PVA have almost the same density, I assume you get about the same length for a given weight.
Another possible use case for using Simplify3D is if you decide you just don’t want to be bothered trying to figure out how to print a model without supports. Maybe you just want to print your models as they are and to heck with juggling them so they don’t need supports. In that case, being able to have minimal support to dissolve would be a big help.
Of course, you really need at least an IDEX printer to take advantage of this feature. Jumping back and forth from PLA to PVA throughout a print just doesn’t make sense. In fact, a ITEX printer would be even better. That way, you could print a model in say, PETG, use PLA for most of the support, and PVA for the dense support.
BTW, 1 thing I’ve seen in various forums is the use of different filament types to do supports. If you have an IDEX printer, you can use PETG for the model and PLA for the supports. Supposedly, PLA and PETG don’t stick too well to each other, so the PLA supports break away quite easily. Also, making it possible to use a different extruder for dense supports was a user-requested feature. It was 1st requested by someone at the NIH who works on the NIH 3D Print Exchange project. They print 3D models of proteins, which basically consist of mostly overhangs.
Appears you can do this with Prusa Slicer too. Might take some fiddling to get it to work with a non Prusa MMU2S printer. My guess would be install a MMUS2 printer then port the profiles over to your printer.
Further reading: MMU2S and soluble materials (PVA/BVOH) | Prusa Knowledge Base
That’s good news.
This is the 1st model that I have printed that I didn’t transfer to the SD card and set the printer to Duplication mode on the printer screen. The body was sliced in Ideamaker which has an option for duplicate. The feet and arms were sliced with Prusa Slicer with a printer set to the bed size of 150x300mm and in the Startup Gcode I added a M605 S2 which put the printer in the duplicate mode.
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