I too have long felt that printing curios and trinkets in multiple colors is uninteresting BUT do not allow yourself to be fooled into thinking that is all MMUs and toolheads bring to the table…
Go watch the Clough42 video where he prints bellows-style way covers for his PM mill by sandwiching TPU in between PLA layers on his H2D and tell me that doesn’t intrigue you. The only reason I haven’t started a project like this for my Makita LS1219S’s linear tubes is due to the sheer amount of waste material produced by the X1C/AMS.
It has been well known for a while now that PLA and PETG will act as zero gap breakaway support material for one another, and I still use this technique sometimes to get perfectly smooth, dimensionally accurate overhangs on certain mechanical parts in spite of the purge waste it produces. This is the sort of stuff that creative people will be doing with the tool changers and I believe it is going to feel like a renaissance of new interesting techniques.
Imagine what sort of unique textile products people like Kaizen 3D will make when they have access to any material where the penalty for switching is a mere 4-8 seconds or so added to the total print time. Overmoulded elastomeric features on housings, expanded use of engineering materials like PPA and exotic support materials like water soluble ones …
The future WITHOUT tool changing is the boring one.
What printer do you own? I have x1c which is just couple of years old but even now is really amazing high performance modern 3d printer. Now take H2D - lots of sensors, servo extruder, Dual nozzle, attachments, upgradable to vortex. So wtf you are talking about?
it’s better to spend time polishing technology before releasing it otherwise if it is half baked you would be the first one barking about dodgy innovation based on how you are not happy with multicolor printing.
You could have grabbed the sentiment of the forum if you had come at this from a different direction.
“I hate colour, I don’t need it, do more of what I want”
That comes across poorly.
We have gained a lot from many recent advancements geared towards changing colours, I would like to see more innovation in other areas next, speed for example, but anything else which would improve the 3D printing experience.
This has a different approach.
I would like to see far more effort put into speeding up prints. I expect this will come from the use of multiple nozzle sizes within a single print, infill using bigger nozzles, details using smaller nozzles.
These would require an INDX or a tool changer to really improve things, the existing H2C isn’t well-suited for this.
Dumb stuff, because it is me.
52-year-old child
You had me at ‘pleasure me’, you should have led with that, who cares about a made bed!
I completely agree with the sentiment about multi color prints, for my use case- mostly just engineering and designing motorcycle and automotive parts (a lot of them just prototypes or molds) the multiple colors is for the most part practically useless. Also that they should be focusing more on reliability and practical/functional aspects of printers (and its software) rather than competing for a specific features that to me seems to be geared more towards hobbyists and/or print farmers.
However multiple nozzle sizes does have some good, although somewhat limited use cases (for myself), I.e. for bigger sections of prints that don’t need as much detail or tolerance allowances but also have more detailed regions like gasket surfaces, fluid orifices or outlets, or even printing a different material support interface quickly etc.
I also do believe it’s not a completely useless competition in the sense that the end goal is actually to reduce filament waste AND speed up multi color prints for those who do them. Those are definitely two valid and commendable goals, waste reduction being the most commendable of the two.