Going to dual extrusion soon, mainly for soluble support material. I heard there is the possibility to use the soluble filament only on contact surfaces, which is great. But which slicer supports this feature ? Somebody who already done that, can you please share your experience and tips ?
Thanks.
I’m not sure what you mean by “contact surfaces,” but I can attest that Simplify3D allows for custom support placement. It’s not a free program, so that may put some people off.
You can also use Meshmixer to generate custom supports and export the model as two individual components, one for the primary filament extruder and one for the support filament extruder.
When properly created in Meshmixer, the reference origin points are identical. Simplify3D allows importing of the components to be aligned by those reference points, but also allows fine tuning of placement if necessary.
I expect that you’ll find other, likely free slicer software will properly manage support generation. I cannot attest to the custom aspect of those programs, however.
I tried dual with hips. Not easy, not worth it IMHO. Someone else may have had different results.
Slic3r supports it in the multiextrusion tab. You can set either support, interfacelayers or both. Also you can set infill or perimeters for multicolor/material.
But beware. Hips needs high temps, even on heatbed which are not good for pla or petg. Pva on the other hand is hard to print. It cloggs in the nozzle. Still havent got it to work. There is some high-t-lay which is water suluable which ive just ordered. Hope this doesnt clogg.
And then there is polymaker polysupport. Very fine material. Works with abs and pet and also pc. But its not suluable in water, yet still very very easy to remove!
Yes Lord_Vader, you understood what I meant. Sorry, English is not my first language.
Very interesting that polysupport. I saw once a commercial 3d printer that printed mostly in PC, wich used quite some interesting technique to deal with “print adhesion”. It had sacrificial sheets of semi-flexible polycarbonate as bed surface, printed a first raft on it which fused completely to the bed surface, and a second raft using the support filament. The 3D object was than printed on this second raft. When printing was done, the objects just popped of from the rafts just by slightly flexing the sacrificial sheet, because of the weak structure of the support filament, which was very brittle and had weak adhesion.
This might be some idea to experiment at home… it can be adapted not to use “sacrificial beds”.