Yeah… I don’t know… Interesting concept maybe, but rather than release the design they’re attempting to patent it and sell it. They have every right to, sure, but it still seems to run a bit counter to the whole spirit of the community.
I see one big problem… To get no strings I need to retract… I know many others who need to use retract too… As far as I can see, retract is not possible with this extruder, because that makes it shift to the other side instead…
Pretty cool… but I was confused after seeing so many “extruders” mentioned recently that turned raw pellets into filament, such as the Filastruder. I wonder if there’s a better name for products like Filastruder or for the actual filament feed system (which is what this product is) to avoid confusion.
Still, seems like a good and proper engineering solution to feeding more filaments in a smaller space.
This, to me, is another example of a group of mildly capable people trying to take advantage of kickstarter and the 3D printing community with a product that simply will not work. It’s not as bad as the collapsible printer we put a stop to many months ago, but between the grating explanations and lack of retraction discussion, I think that supporting these guys is a waste of money.
When printing with multiple heads, retraction is all the more important- if reversing simply drives the other filament, then the previously driven extruder will dribble and leak all over the print. I’d like a small footprint dual extruder, but one that actually works… @Michael_Andresen is right, and I imagine many experts would agree. @nop_head ? +Anthony Morris ?
Well, they say their models will have an auto-retract-feature - that might be some spring-loaded device that pulls the filament from the hotend when the motor disengages.
However, the fact that they are going for a patent with their weird wobbly-face design should give you a clear hint not to support them. Plus, they got their first printer six months before the kickstarter, so these aren’t experienced operators either.
Um this is already a thing in commercial printers. How can they patent it?
@John_Ecker_GeoDroidJ which printers exactly?
Plus, the patent might not even be for the actual mechanism itself, but for some sub-feature of the thing that has nothing to so with the actual driving process.
I’ve seen it in a dimension dual material sst.
And the patent is also pending, there’s every possibility it won’t be granted. But the fact that they’re going for one in the first place is enough to sour me on it.
The Uprint has a (patented, ugh) system that uses a single motor spinning in opposite direction to drive two filaments. Rather than using the motion of the motor to engage/disengage the filament, it moves the extruder to one side (where it presumably does a wipe) and presses the extruder block against a stop to flip a bistable spring mechanism to the other side.
As for these guys, I don’t think their mechanism will work very well, but screw them for trying to patent it anyway.
Beyond retraction issues, which I don’t see as solvable without using a dump system (like Stratasys), there is no cooling solution in their hotends. Yeah, I’d avoid this like the plague.