Before I went in for my spine surgery on 10/02/24, I saw that Sunlu was bringing a filament splicer to market soon. Like everyone else, I am accumulating a lot of pieces that are not enough for a project but if I could splice them together, they might be good for printing prototypes. So I ordered one, figuring that it would give me something to do while recovering. Well it finally arrived today and I wanted to share my initial experience with those here who might be interested in it.
The unit is smaller than I was expecting, although I don’t really know what I was expecting. It measures 11 cm (4.24") by 8 cm (3.125") by 3.5 cm (1.375") tall.
Opening the cover, you see a cutting slot in back of the business end of the unit - the heater.
This next picture shows the header element open:
You place a 26 mm PFTE tube containing the two ends of the filaments you want to splice together in the channel, close the heater cover and the unit takes about 5 seconds to splice PLA filament. When done, the unit beeps, you open the heater cover and remove the spliced filament. Let it cool for a few seconds, the lay the PFTE tube in the cutting slot and shut the cover of the unit. This slices the PFTE tube lengthwise so that you can easily remove it.
It didn’t take me too many tries to get the knack of it. Here’s a few pictures of the first few splices I made of a variety of colors and brands of PLA filament so you can decide for yourself if it is good enough or not. I think its OK but honestly, my final decision on that will be made after I actually use the spliced filaments to see if there is any issue.
This is the PFTE tube with the spliced filaments after removing it from the heater. The next picture shows the PFTE tube slid off the spliced area.
Here’s a flew more splices:
A few observations & comments about the process: First, the pieces I have are all the ends of spools, meaning the filament is wound fairly tightly and it is difficult to work with unless you can straighten out a bit of length for each of the two filaments to be spliced. And it doesn’t take long before you have a long enough length of filament that becomes a birds nest! I am going to try to rig up two spoolers, one on either side of the Sunlu filament splicer so that I avoid having a birds nest created.
Second, it is best if you cut the ends to be spliced on as oblique an angle as you can in order to give as much surface area for the splice. The directions that come with the unit explain that, and it is important to not gloss over that directive!
The unit will handle PCL, PLA, ABS, PETG and PA/PC filaments. You select the filament type on the front touch panel and the unit will automatically heat to the proper temperature for that filament and will set the timer accordingly. The usage instructions booklet provided does a fairly good job of explaining things in proper English and German. The unit comes with a USB charging cable (you need to supply the charger) and 200 PFTE tubes. For the pieces I was splicing,
they all ranged in length from about <1 meter to about 5 meters. For the shorter pieces, I simply slid the PFTE tube down the length of the filament to its end for the next splice and reused the PFTE tube. For the longer pieces, I used the cutter to remove the PFTE tube. Not sure where you can get PTFE tube this narrow (OD ~ 3 mm) but I’m sure Sunlu will be selling them.
There you have it for what its worth. The unit cost me about $45 USD. You can decide for yourself if it is worth the money and does a good enough job.