Question New dual color filament

[DrNezbit]

Has anyone tried this or seen it in person?

AMOLEN 3D Printer Filament, PLA Filament 1.75mm Dual Color Filament, Silk Red Green 3D Printing Filament 1KG/2.2lb

https://a.co/d/48k6UBP

Video:

https://www.amazon.com/ive?ingressType=dpimageblock&productAsin=B09YT9J6SC&viewData=%5B%7B%22videoId%22%3A%2202bf23f13c7e4778a7a58765a108a6ac%22%7D%5D&ref=dp_ib_7_ivx_share

Curious if it is as awesome as it looks before I look into ordering some

 

[DrNezbit]

Awesome!! Thanks! Did you also look into possibly changing the shape from a hexagon to a diamond or anything else? Just curious if you found any better shapes. I'd like to try out some 1.6mm in different shapes and see if any work better. Or maybe something that's like 1.6mm tall by maybe 1.8mm wide and see if the width could compensate for the height. As long as it fits in the tubing it should work, so maybe you could redesign the original model for better extrusion

Also, it seems to me like spooling it up and running it through all my tubing keeps it from rotating on me.

 

[Eric]

By projecting that coil to a new sketch in fusion 360 I was able to make a sketch that uses that projection as a rail for a "sweep" of a custom shape. I chose a polygon with 5 sides to experiment with making die fit filament so that you can theoretically control the twist of filament by using a guide block between the Bowden tube and extruder. This method could be used to make filament in any shape though. Not sure what other reason you would have but I never imagined this reason until now so who knows?


This one is 1.75mm at the height so it's necessarily going to under extrude. I didn't want to make it wider than the specs of the printer though and make it wear or jam up the ptfe with the corners. I will just keep the flow multiplier up, probably higher than the previous 140%.



Now I just need to print the guide block and the filament!

 

[DrNezbit]

Awesome! I can't wait to see. Will be trying more color combinations until then. The pink and green showed up a little better, but overall not very well in my opinion. The green still overpowered the color changing one too much. Printed it at 130% extrusion and got better results, but moving down to 128% for my next attempt. Will get some pictures of both when my current one finishes

 

[Eric]

Here's my experiment with ratios, yellow is on the bottom in this orientation and purple on top. From left to right we have 1/8th purple, 1/4 purple, and 1/2 purple.


There is about 11g of plastic per each with this particular print spiral. For each ratio I am going to be printing a cylinder spiral vase that takes 3.66g. It has no bottom layers so it's just the side views. After that I print the complex vase "3dSpirographVase14.stl" from the following thingiverse files:

Customisable Spirograph Vase Generator by PaulM

Remember Spirograph? Now available in 3d! Classic spirograph involves rotating one cog around the inside or outside of another fixed cog. A pen is used through a hole in the rotating cog to trace out a spirograph pattern. The spirograph vase extends this to the third dimension by extruding and...

www.thingiverse.com

After I get the results from this I want to try the pentagon filament with filament orientation guide blocks!

 

[DrNezbit]

Just finished printing the pink one
It turned out amazing! You can see how the green still really took over even with even layers of each. The pink I mixed with some AMOLEN glow in the dark called "firefly" it's green glow with speckles in it. By itself is what I used for the ghost in my profile picture. This is how it turned out when under blacklight and glowing


I'm super happy with that combination and can't wait to see what it looks like cooled down to purple. I'm currently printing one of the green mixed with the same glow in the dark to see how it turns out

 

[Eric]

Wow the firefly stuff is amazing! That one is a perfect one for mixing in too, just a little seems to go long way for that effect!

Here's a probably patentable idea, use shape extruded filament and control the rotation of the filament entering the extruder with a small motor, then pair it with tons of programming work to make a slicer and you could actually paint the print by adjusting what side of the different colored filament was facing outwards. It would necessarily need to be a proprietary filament, printer and software, but a fun idea.

 

[DrNezbit]

Wow, that's interesting. I never would have thought of that, but it sounds possible. The downside of the firefly is that it only glows brightly for about 1-2 seconds after the blacklight leaves, then fades to about 25% glow pretty fast. The sparkles give it a nice touch though. Would definitely look spectacular in a blacklight room

 

[Eric]

Ooh, now what if you did your mushroom with the firefly in it and internal UV LED so they would seemingly just be glowing on their own (in a very dark room). Would probably need to be very thin walls but would be fun effect!

 

[DrNezbit]

Now that would be neat!


Here's how the green turned out right after the blacklight is removed. It worked pretty well too. Now I'm curious what would happen if I mixed this with it
It dosent glow quite as bright, but it glows brighter for longer. Wonder if the green glow would overpower it or if I could do a dual color glow in the dark print with speckles.

The mushrooms themselves are also separate pieces, there's a gill that screws into the cap, so you could theoretically drill a hole in the stem to place an led under the cap. The caps aren't very thick, so I'd imagine it would work pretty well

 

[Eric]

Here are my results from some different ratios of the Yellow and Purple Silk filament, I did a cylinder and more complex vase for each and have the prime wipe showing how the look as they are laid down.

1/8 purple - Just a kind of light sheen of the purple making it almost iridescent, the silk make it very shiny on the purple side facing the camera


1/4 - This seemed like a better mix, the purple is actually visible but not it's full color still.


1/2 - These both stayed aligned for almost the entire print except for the beginning of the cylinder where it did 180* flip for some reason.


It really worked well for the 2-sided effect this time, I think the guide block will be interesting if it works though, it would be really cool to see it controlled. I suspect the commercial filament doesn't spiral as badly by being tightly wound on the spool but I'm going to have to order some to find out.

Yellow side:


Purple Side:



One thing that I noticed with the silk filament is that it applies more tension than the regular PLA. I don't remember what that effect is called but silk filaments will warp and shrink in length while getting wider if you let them extrude out of the nozzle in the air. if the print isn't getting adhesion it was enough to pull the filament in towards the purple side.

 

[Andy]

Y'all are making me want to test out this teal/white combo I've been making blobs of all day.

 

[Eric]

I don't think I have any white at home but I think it might be a good color for mixing! The teal with it reminds me of tropic waters and white sand beaches.

 

[DrNezbit]

I think that would look pretty good. I'm definitely going to have to try to reprint the green/pink at 1/4 green and see how it looks

 

[Eric]

Currently working on the filament guide for pentagonal filament. I make no room for tolerances on my first version and unsprisingly the filament does not fit through the hole. I am reprinting it now with 0.2mm tolerance and switching away from the silk filament just in case that one isn't as dimensionally accurate since it does funny things when it's extruded.

I found the prusa file for the IR sensor top cover that filament goes through, I then added a cylinder with the pentagon sketch from the filament centered on it and then extruded through to make a pentagon tunnel. It came out pretty rounded in reality so I am going to try and tweak the slicer settings to be a little more careful as well.


The stock IR sensor cover is that little black piece screwed onto the top. The purple silk was loaded already so I used that for the replacement. Next one is going to be in the yellow PLA so I can compare the two dimensionally and see if the silk factor is important or not. The purple is way cooler looking.


That hole doesn't even look like a pentagon!

 

[DrNezbit]

Wonder if you'd be able to take a Allen wrench and heat it up and press it through that hole to give it the right shape

 

[Andy]

I've been off this thread for a bit, but the idea of making pentagonal-shaped filament is to keep it from rotating during printing, right? How does commercial 2-color filament avoid this issue? It seems like just tension from the reel wouldn't be enough to make up that difference, but could you try winding these tests around an empty reel just to test that?

 

[DrNezbit]

Wrapping it onto an empty spool is what I've been doing, then running it through my tubing. I haven't gotten any rotation on mine, but I'm guessing the combination of the spool and tubing is keeping it aligned for me. I'm guessing that the factory spools being wound professionally would stay the same angle as they print, but I'm not sure with a direct drive and the filament coming straight down. I'm wondering if the left to right motion of the head is what's making it rotate a bit as it tries to curve back and forth

 

[Andy]

Ohhhh, that makes sense. @Eric have you used commercial dual-color filament on a direct drive before? Did it have the same issue?

 

[DrNezbit]

What if you were to replace the hexagon hole with a threaded PTFE tube coupler hole. Then you could either try attaching some tubing to hold it at the correct angle, or try to make a small threaded insert with the correct shape hole. That would save each test being a whole new plate and allow you to only print the threaded piece of there's any mistakes. Could also try making a threaded cap with a thin top in order to melt an Allen wrench through for the correct shape

Edit:
I found this too if it helps

MK3S FS Cover for PTFE tube link to filament dryer by Flo4Thing

Using a Sunlu filadryer, I wanted that spool and filament were kept secure after printing until I am available to store the spool properly.So I designed 3 parts to adapt a PTFE tube to link the dryer to the FS Cover and keep the filament always out of humidity during printing. And you can let it...

www.thingiverse.com

 

[Eric]

I've been off this thread for a bit, but the idea of making pentagonal-shaped filament is to keep it from rotating during printing, right? How does commercial 2-color filament avoid this issue? It seems like just tension from the reel wouldn't be enough to make up that difference, but could you try winding these tests around an empty reel just to test that?

I haven't tried the commercial dual color filament but I think putting them on a spool definitely would solve like 99% of this problem. Part of the issue though is the small amount of filament being made means it's going to unwind off the spool before long anyways, at least in my setup where the spool is pretty high up.

What if you were to replace the hexagon hole with a threaded PTFE tube coupler hole. Then you could either try attaching some tubing to hold it at the correct angle, or try to make a small threaded insert with the correct shape hole. That would save each test being a whole new plate and allow you to only print the threaded piece of there's any mistakes. Could also try making a threaded cap with a thin top in order to melt an Allen wrench through for the correct shape

Edit:
I found this too if it helps

MK3S FS Cover for PTFE tube link to filament dryer by Flo4Thing

Using a Sunlu filadryer, I wanted that spool and filament were kept secure after printing until I am available to store the spool properly.So I designed 3 parts to adapt a PTFE tube to link the dryer to the FS Cover and keep the filament always out of humidity during printing. And you can let it...

www.thingiverse.com

I did think about using a Allen wrench but they are hexagons and the pentagonal filament was already printed and takes much longer to print than the IR sensor cover so I figured I'd keep at it. fusion 360 makes it very simple to iterate the design in a few varieties of options so I went ahead and sliced it with multiple options I could work through. The next one with 0.2mm additional tolerance to the hole worked perfect though.

Success! Ugly yellow Success!


The pentagonal filament is slightly wider than 1.75 at the corners so regular filament also fits through the new cover. I didn't plan that but it does mean I don't have to swap out the special cover off to resume regular printing!

I really didnt think the second iteration was going to work or I would picked another color.


My test prints have not had any dual color rotations now, but I think the next experiment is forcing the rotations with the guide by making it on a axis. I'll post some photos of the test prints too.