Mechanical Instrument Altering 3D Printing Prototype

Instrument altering 3D printers are scorching. The thought is that as a substitute of switching filament, you swap out scorching ends or different instruments. That isn’t a brand new concept. Nonetheless, most instrument changers are costly. [Engineers Grow] has one that’s easy and cheap, counting on the printer’s personal motors and a few intelligent mechanics.

Step one was to make a modified extruder that allowed the filament to load and unload. The primary try didn’t work nicely, however that’s the good factor about 3D printing — it’s straightforward to attempt once more. There is just one extruder, which is sweet from the standpoint that you simply don’t want a management board with many outputs and also you keep away from the expense of a number of extruders.

The subsequent step is a spring-loaded filament information to load and unload the brand new extruder. That didn’t work at first, both. Worse, fixing the issues required one more redesign of the extruder.

The recent finish holds with magnets. This isn’t at all times as steady as you prefer to, nevertheless it ought to work, particularly with the pin alignment scheme. The instrument plate engages with the top and strikes to the aspect to interrupt the magnetic grip. A bracket works the levers to deal with the filament modifications.

All the things appeared to work when manually shifting issues round. Macro growth ultimately wound up with every part working with two heads after troubleshooting a couple of points. Of major concern is the recent ends aren’t rigidly held, and docking wasn’t at all times repeatable. Nonetheless, that is only a prototype and it does work. It solely wants extra rigidity and repeatability.

Outdoors of the printer itself, the changer prices about $100, though that can change relying on the variety of extruders. Since the entire thing is printer-specific and never absolutely practical, there aren’t any fashions or code — and it appears like [Engineers Grow] plans to make them accessible solely when you have a membership. However the concept is sound, and there’s sufficient info within the video so that you can do your personal experiments utilizing this mechanical-only design. Tell us what you give you.

We’ve seen passive changers on CNC earlier than. Most of the others we’ve seen use electromagnets. Our personal [Sonya Vasquez] did a tackle this with Jubilee.