I can’t believe the hype this is getting! Some fairly well known engineer with seemingly little to no 3D printing experience posts some very early renderings of a what is, imho, kind of a ridiculous approach to multi-material printing. All the sudden tech crunch and others pick up the story like its a legit concept!
I’m sure @Sanjay_Mortimer , @Whosa_whatsis , etc. might agree with me that the pictured design faces some serious challenges - the extreme length of the melt zone, shearing the melt zone on carousel rotation, and providing a seal so the molten plastic doesn’t leak out at the switching junction make it seem… nearly impossible.
The kraken fits 4 nozzles in a similar space, albeit while requiring a bowden drive to get it all in. Has anyone toyed with the idea of a kraken with 3 nozzles fed via bowden, and the last via an effector mounted extruder? For filaments like ninjaflex that (I think?) are impossible to print well via bowden drive…
I find it rather amusing…how the hell do you move it once the molten material hardens in the switched zone…unless you keep it all hot.
But then it will dribble or burn on the unused nozzles.
I agree with you on the challenges this faces. I’ve been doing a lot of playing with sealing of hot plastic in moving parts recently - there are some really cool seals and O-Rings out there that make this a feasible project IMHO.
However whether it is actually worth doing is another question. This looks to me to be not a multi-material printer, but rather a multi-resolution printer. I only see facility here to change nozzle size, not to change material? (Correct me if I’m wrong).
Changing nozzle size is nice and all, but I don’t think it is a compelling enough advantage to warrant this level of complexity.
TL:DR:
It can probably be done, it’ll be expensive. I don’t think it will be very useful.
Since it’s been proven in prototypes, I’d rather see engineers getting away from multiple nozzles for multi-material prints altogether and work more on blending nozzles with rapid, clean switches.
We know it can be done, so now I’d just love to see it get refined.
