Anyone still working with PVA? My feeling is that most people gave up on this. Is it because of the lack of really good dual extrusion systems or its lousy printing properties?
Dual extrusion doesn’t seem to be a priority. Sure there are cheap machines with dual extruders but I bet a lot of them are rarely used for dual material printing. Most folks tend to use them as a convenience for being able to select between two different materials e.g. PLA or ABS.
My growing interest is for printing with soluble support material and I would like to have two machines for doing PLA+PVA and ABS+HIPS with occasion uses for other materials. I dislike having to frequently change materials with all the associated recalibration etc. that it can entail.
Cheap dual machines will never work reliable and clean enough. I’ve been printing some 150 hrs with dual extrusion and different types of materials now and get clean results without using priming towers or ooze shields. But for PVA I see few use cases where the benefits outweigh the nasty printing properties.
I heard PVA is hard to work with and it decomposes rapidly while hot, making it very prone to jamming. I do dual ABS and HIPS but that was kind of a long road and I tend to only do it for specific kinds of parts, largely prototyping parts designed for other kinds of production.
I heard E3D Scaffold works well but it’s expensive and very few resellers seem to have it.
Hardest part of a good dual-extrusion print is the oozing of the inactive nozzle, isn’t it?
PVA really is crap. It prints somewhat OK if it is really Dry. but it oozes and solidifies in the nozzle… but the material itself is good. I am still waiting for a good water soluble support material that sticks. like the Stratasys support material from the elite for example ( ok it needs sodium hydroxyde solution to dissolve) but otherwise perfect. ( and probably patented)
I’m using my tool changer and a new wiper design (cannot publish atm) so zero oozing. Ordered some Scaffold - we’ll see …
When switching tools, you can do a long retract to pull the material out of the heated zone when it’s not printing. Ooze is negligible on my modified Chimera setup. I think slicers call it a “tool change retract”. Can do short custom g code in the tool change section too.
But my use is currently HIPS for the support material.
I know the advantages of using dissolvable filament, but really if I use mesh mixer supports, removal is so easy I wouldn’t bother with the mess (for most parts
+Camerin hahn Soluble support is the only option if you are trying to generate complex internal geometries without splitting the print into multiple parts.
@Neil_Darlow yes, but 99% of the time a really minor change in that geometry will make it printable at some angle. Maybe not the most convenient angle, but it is still printable.
My point is if you lay it flat it may not be printable, bit if you rotate to an in air suspension it may be printable. I use mesh mixer for that
Price pl