Reducing Poop On Multicolor Prints

Multicolor printing is a great way to eliminate painting and produce vibrant objects. However, it comes with two significant drawbacks; filament usage and print time. If a single-nozzle filament print needs to switch colors, it will need to switch to the new filament, purge the transition material that contains both colors and then resume the print using the new color.

[teachingtech] Tests a variety methods to reduce waste and print time. One surprising result was that purging into the infill didn’t result in significant savings, even when the infill was as high as 50%. Some things that had a positive impact included reducing the amount purge per transition, based on the light to dark color change, and printing multiples copies at once, so that, even though the total waste was the same, the waste per piece was reduced.

All of the tests were with the same model, which had 229 color changes within a small part, so your mileage may vary, but it’s an interesting investigation into some of the deeper settings within the slicer. It’s a noble goal to reduce filament waste and print times. If you build your own extruder you can turn that purge waste into different shades of greenish-brownish filament.