I have a round part that has a clear horizontal overhang, much like a hat that is upside down (hat brim at the top). This is of course on a P1S printer, and I’m running the (green) TPU from a drybox next to the printer.
My PLAN is to pause the print at layer 129, manually swap out the TPU for (red) PLA, print the PLA interface layer, press Continue, then pause at the NEXT layer (layer 130) and swap out the PLA interface filament for tor the original TPU to continue printing.
Here’s my dilemma:
If I swap out for PLA at layer 129, what happens to the object’s structure at that layer which is EXPECTING TPU. IOW part of layer 129 is support interface, but the object is still expecting TPU on it’s layer 129. My fear of course is that the final print will be weak or debond at layer 129 as it’s no longer TPU on TPU.
Any thoughts on how to manually process these (external) filament changes?
Do you also have an AMS, or are you going to be running both filaments from the external spool? Also, is this “TPU for AMS”? What shore hardness?
If you have an AMS, you can put the PLA into one of the AMS slots, and then set your TPU as external. For example:
Then, in the slicer settings, set your “Support interface” to the PLA, rather than pausing the print at a specific layer.
From there, you should be able to babysit and try to unload/load the TPU, run the cold pulls, etc.
However, I’m not sure how much success you will have, given all those extra steps would have to be done while in the middle of the print process.
If you are trying to run both the TPU and PLA from the external spool holder… I’m not sure how you would achieve what you want to do.
Yes I do have an AMS, and I’ve done the “normal” support filament process for the interface layer before (successfully).
However I’m running Nova TPU that will not feed thru AMS, so there ‘needs’ to be some manual intervention.
I’ll try your suggestion and see if I can get that to work. Thanks for responding.
Sounds good. Hope it works!
