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

 

[Eric]

Here is the test prints with the yellow filament guide block. This filament mix is Purple Silk and Gold Silk, giving me Aladdin vibes.




I’m going to try making enough of this filament combo to do a real print of a small planter or something. I think if i maintain the same insertion alignment between reels it should be able to keep the color alignment.

Another idea is trying out some infill patterns on an 0 top-layer print. I think the patterns will really stick out with the dual color stripes.

 

[DrNezbit]

Awesome! Glad it worked. Those look great!

 

[Eric]

In a two birds situation I realized I could get a real print with that filament and solve my ugly yellow extruder cap.





I think if I had some silk blue filament to mix in with it you could get a real Bismuth look going!

 

[Eric]

Okay, so I was looking at the listing again, scorning myself for the possibility that I could be ordering MORE filament, as if I didn't have enough, but I noticed something:




Great color choices, but those are some serious tiger stripes! There is clearly either inconsistent ratio of red to blue or their filament is spiraling as well.



It's hard to tell from the photo if the filament is being wound twisted or if the colors are not evenly distributed depending now which coils you look at. I'm going to have to order some to see it in person because I've clearly become obsessed with dual color filament.

I was thinking about how since we can control the spin and distribution though, how many colors could you get on print? Some late night deranged math and I have come up with a plan.




So there is a lot of experimentation and learning in the form of chicken stratch. The important thing is I came up with some numbers that will give me a starting point for making filament composed of 5 strands. Now without using a multi material upgrade you can't really print this in one go. Instead the plan is to print 5 coils of the triangle shape and then join together using some sort of magic, maybe weld-on 3 or a filament re-extruder.

 

[DrNezbit]

Wow! It's in all of them!! I never noticed that before. Definitely makes me think that it's their filament colors either aren't even, or they're getting rotation, or maybe their filament has rotation to it? In the image of the red/blue spool the first 2 strands have a red to red side, and about halfway in there's another swap back where it goes red to red side again. May just be unwound a bit, but the way I've been spooling the printed kind by hand all the sides are opposites touching, not the same, so that makes me think they may have a roll in their extrusion/winding process maybe.

The green and blue image looks so striped its almost like it's supposed to be that way, but the green and red one looks like it rotated pretty bad during their photography model print and they just left it, or maybe the filament went completely red on them for a minute. Either way I don't think their intent was to have it about cut in half by a red line


Seems to me like you might be onto something with this idea, but I'm not sure if the extrusion to bind the 2 halves or multiple triangles wouldn't form unevenness in it as it presses them together

 

[DrNezbit]

Oh, I just found this too, haven't printed it yet, but I think it will be good for wrapping custom filaments onto

Small 2-piece Filament Spool by Dingoboy71

EDIT: Decided to make a couple of improvements: I shaved the outer 2mm off the entire spool to use less plastic, and added filament anchors along both inner & outer edges. There are now 3 anchors on the inner edge of differing angles to give you options, and 5 outer rim anchors for tying up...

www.thingiverse.com

May even have to see how it turns out dual color

Found this link to some professional tri color too I thought was interesting
Reprapper Triple Color Filament Coextrusion PLA Filament 1.75mm for 3D Printer & 3D Pen, Multicolor Like Dual Color Rainbow PLA, 2.2lbs (1kg), Silk PLA Red / Gold / Blue https://a.co/d/g5uOEod

 

[Eric]

I really want to see how they are extruding the filament at these commercial shops. Is it using filament or do they have a special 3 way hopper for pellets? I imagine you could possibly have 3 regular auger pellet extruders feed into one chamber and rextruded without much mixing if the chamber was small. I'm pretty sure they are not printing it

 

[Eric]

I took some of the first color of the new triangle filament and used the ugly cover as a guide to test. It seems like it's possible to get it in there the right way and it doesn't want to be spun. I will print some more guide blocks out so I can use them as bundle ties while I figure out a way to fuse the filament. I will bring home some PTFE tubing too to help with managing it all.

 

[DrNezbit]

Awesome! So is that filament the same 2mm .stl you originally released here, just split into triangles? If so, could you possibly make some various sizes of your original so I could print some with a layer swap to test out? Looks like it's printing way better then the original without gap fill on and I'd like to give it a shot in like a smaller test like the original smaller file has before printing a super long one

If not, I'd love to try out a 1.75mm of the hexagon style so I could try out a layer change in a shorter test version and a longer version for when I get my slicer and print settings dialed in for it

 

[Eric]

I used the pentagonal-filament to make the triangle filament but I had not posted that file yet so here it is!

I think you should be able to slice it and divide it up to dual color just the same as mine, being a pentagon I'm not sure where the half-way point actually is but I had been printing it 0.2mm and just eyeballed the halfway mark. The filament fits through PTFE tubing so it shouldn't have any trouble on anyone's printers. If comes out too thick or something let me know though and I'll upload a thinner version. If you're using version 5 or higher of Cura you should also be getting the same variable line width as with Arachne, I am downloading a new version of Cura now because I didn't realize they also had implemented it in version 5.

I also included the Fusion360 file incase anyone wants to try experimenting with it. Fusion360 is free for hobbyists so don't let the price steer you away if you ever wanted to get into CAD.



The triangle filament is in there too. I tried a million different settings in prusa2.4 and prusa 2.5 w/ arachne but what I am currently using is the 0.07mm ultra-quality preset with Arachne engine. I also set the first layer height to 0.15mm which is the minimum you can do on a prusa. Just one set of the triangle filament with those settings is like a 1 hour and 20 minute print, so I'm definitely should have tried with less filament for the experiment but I've got 4 of the colors done and working on the last one.

I need to make more guide blocks next.

 

[DrNezbit]

Awesome!!! Thank you! I'll have to slice it up and give it a shot. Not sure if my laptop can run fusion360, but I'll check it out too. I haven't gotten into 3d design much but been needing to learn it now that I have a printer. I'll let you know how slicing and printing goes

 

[Eric]

If fusion360 gives you any trouble I would also check out the free www.TinkerCAD.com from the same company. It is very simple but you can make really effective tools and jigs in it. It can also do extrusions and import SVG files so you can do all sorts of signwork in it. I sold a lot of prints i designed in there.

If you find tinkercad too simple for a project there is also browser based www.onshape.com but i think they are a paid service.

 

[Eric]

I used some weld-on 3 solvent in the needle applicator and had great success in joining the previously posted test bundle. I threaded them through spare guide block and then fed them into the first printed guide block that was too tight. It still would not fit through all the way but i was able to use it as a clamp for the filament end. I slide the looser guide block up the bundle using it sort the strands and then tacked the filament together with the weld-on 3. It has a 60 second working time and is fully cured in 180 seconds so I used my (gloved) fingers to roll the filament around while keeping it squished together and only about 10 seconds of that was enough to keep it together to cure it on its own. I slide the guide blocks around during the working time so they didnt get stuck too. If the PTFE tube doesnt melt in weldon i might be able to just squirt it down the tube and weld large sections at once. If not i plan to weld small sections every few inches and hopefully that will be sufficient.


Very hard to photo but its actually pentagon shaped! Even more suprising its 1.8mm from base to peak at the widest part and about 1.75mm for the rest. Commercial filaments are boasting 0.01-0.05mm tolerances so I’m 10x sloppier but part of that is inherit in the pentagon shape.



Once I glue up the 5 color version I figure the best print test I could do would be printing pentagon vase aligned with the extruder guide block. Hopefully that will show how well we can get 5 colors separated and aligned.

 

[Eric]

Here is my filament weaver, or is it an unweaver?



The prototypes have found new life, my first mix will be similar to these but one of the silver will be white which is still printing. Not a very cool combo but high contrast I hope.

 

[Eric]

I was able to make a short length of the 5 color filament. I didn't give the filament much time to dry after using the solvent on it so it had a lot of popping and bubbling like you would see with hydrated filament. Next time I use solvent on the filament I will run it through the dehydrator first to see if that helps.

Unfortunately my colors are not very different in this reel so I think I need to find some other colors of PLA to try. I had ran Purple silk, White, Orange, Silver Silk and Gold Silk, other than the purple the other colors were too close to each other and made the result kinda hard to see.

I printed a pentagon that was aligned in the builplate the same as the filament guide, base towards the front and the point top towards the back of the printer. The print is a little inconsistent thanks the bubbling and popping but it seems like it proves the concept just the same. I think a lot of the problems I'm seeing here wouldn't exist if you made the filament commercially and used CNC cut dies to extrude the triangles and rejoin them together.

Here I rotate the print to match the side of the filament, the effect definitely worked but the print quality was terrible with those bubbles.

 

[DrNezbit]

Awesome! I've ran into an issue with Cura 5 not wanting to run on my laptop. It installed and everything but when I open it I get an error about my video card drivers. Haven't had time to investigate more yet. Was able to slice your pentafilament from my son's laptop with Cura 5, but still haven't printed it yet either. It's been a pretty busy week so far but hopefully I'll be able to get to it this weekend

 

[DrNezbit]

Ok, so I got the Pentafilament™ sliced on cura 5 from another laptop and was able to print a few strands. It's a good fit through my Capricorn tubing and prints great at 100% flow. Way better results then the original diy dual color in my opinion. Would be a good post to thingiverse I think if you have an account @Eric. Printing more to print more stuff with it right now. Loving it a lot. Thanks a bunch

 

[Eric]

That's awesome that it worked out well for you! So you don't have a pentagon guide block right? It's just the bowden tube keeping the filament from spinning? I will definitely upload these to thingiverse and printables. I would like to make a guide block that goes to the compression fitting for bowden extruders too though.

I have been taking a little break from the filament making to let the well of ideas refill. I think I want to make a better tool for feeding the 5 triangle filaments together. Something that makes it easier to glue them using both the PTFE tubes and a 3d printed guide that arranges them for me.

I did experiment with heating them to melt them together but I didn't have any luck. Some colors melted faster than others and didn't really make them sticky, they just warped and in some cases shrunk and split. I think in a real heated extruder and mechanism to feed the five into one would work, it would only need to have a pentagon hole for the final extruder nozzle, it could be oversized and pulled down to spec like when they make hardcandy (or filament, but the hardcandy demonstrates how you can retain a color pattern even when you stretch the material thinner). I would make the extruder hole oversized to accommodate 5x plastic volume without mixing it. It would also make it easier to machine the pentagon out of the extruder nozzle.

 

[DrNezbit]

Nope, no guide block. I have been wrapping the Pentafilament around an empty spool to print it from though. Found out if I start from the outer end while winding it wants to spool itself a bit near the end where it's really curved. Having it wrapped the same direction and printing from the dryer box seems to keep the spool from rotating as it rolls, and the like 2-3 feet of tubing hold it securely. It's sort of a tight fit compared to industrial 1.75mm through my tubing, but Capricorn tubing is known for having a slightly smaller diameter then standard Bowden tubing I believe, so that could be part of it. Haven't had any jams or anything and it's printing beautifully. I've also tried a few other color combinations and made fidget spinners as test pieces I'll have to get pics of in a bit. I tried to put the filament change in the middle, but I think I have one side that gets a little more then the other.

 

[DrNezbit]

Oh here's maybe a starting idea for a Bowden style feeding guide

Filament Feeder Grommet - Sunlu Dryer by Ferlopezpaz

This is a quick little grommet to improve the feeder hole on a Sunly FilaDryer S1. The factory opening felt a little abrasive on the filament and when it sat the for long enough it seemed to fracture the filament. This grommet is mean to be used with a standard M6 push-to-connect fitting and...

www.thingiverse.com

But with threads on both ends so it can screw into the extruder and the coupler. Or maybe this style coupler thread with the guide in the middle

Angled PTFE Tube Guide for Sunlu FilaDryer S1 by EveningNewbs

Filament guide for the Sunlu FilaDryer S1 that allows the filament to curve gently instead of introducing sharp bends. It's angled as much as possible (21°) while still fitting into the stock outlet hole on the dryer, and uses a push fitting to hold the PTFE tube in place.

www.thingiverse.com