Advice wanted.
I have no experience of 3D printing and plan to buy an H2D. I will be making one-offs. No multi-colour printing expected, though occasionally different colour for different prints. Hope to stick to a limited range of material. However, looking to use a combination of hard and soft plastic (TPU?) regularly. Example parts would be a coupler for joining two air tubes (with gaskets), a case for test equipment (with gasket), and a latch to hold a shutter (with shock-absorbing pads).
For all these reasons I can imagine the printer being permanently loaded with two spools, one hard and one soft plastic. The hard spool occasionally being swapped between colours, or between indoor and outdoor plastics.
Does it make sense to buy two AMS HTs with one feeding each print head? This would appear to be a relatively low-cost option for feeding two heads. Or is there a reason to buy another AMS combination?
I probably would buy one AMS HT and one AMS 2 pro.
The real benefit of the HT is drying materials. If you just want an enclosure to feed material from, you can get that much cheaper. I don’t see much use in 2 HTs.
Even if you don’t print multi-color, having an AMS 2 pro is super convenient so that you have different materials at hand ready for printing. I even bought a second AMS because I use more than 4 filaments regularly.
For big prints, it can automatically swap from an empty spool to an identical second spool, if that is relevant to you.
Thank you Alex. Much appreciated.
You might be right about not having to swap reels when changing materials, at this point it just feels like it won’t make a huge difference to me. I could well be wrong. The argument that you can finish reel one of some filament and then seamlessly carry on with reel two seems pretty powerful though. Less waste, and without even having to think about how much filament is left.
Is it still worth me buying the second unit at all then? Is it worth it to make that unit the AMS HT instead of another AMS 2 Pro?
For that, you don’t need an AMS. You can also swap reels manually. When the first runs out, the printer will stop and ask for loading a new one. The benefit of the AMS is it happens automatically. So even if the first spool runs out in the mid of the night, the printer will go on.
How important the automatic access to different materials is, depends a lot on what and how you print.
I do many small tools and gadgets for the household, that I typically do in white or black PETG. Then, the children want this or that toy occasionally, which will be printed in PLA in one of 4 colors. Then I often have one spool loaded where I test new brands.
special materials that I need rarely, like TPU, PC, xx-CF either go into one of the AMS or on an open spool holder on the other side. I also think about an AMS HT instead of the open spool holder.
Your use case might look completely different. So if changing materials happens rarely, then you might have no benefit from the AMS 2.
I believe though, you would appreciate it in the long run.
Instead of two AMS HT, I would buy only one and
one or many suitable cereal boxes for 5 bucks that you transform into a drybox that you can print from.
Then you use the AMS HT for drying and put the dry filament in a box with some desiccant.
1 Like