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Jared Bullock
Nov 13, 2013, 11:34:15 PM11/13/13
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Hi everyone,
I've asked for help from the AR folks before, and it went really well. Hopefully someone can help with this question, too.
I'm a student doing some 3D printer searching for a research lab. The budget is ~$3000, and we're looking for a rig with dual extruders so that soluble support material can be used. It should also be open-source. As far as I can tell, there are lots of good single-extruder printers out there, but it's harder to find any with two. My question is this: if I find a single-extruder printer that looks good, how hard would it be to add a second extruder? And as a follow-on, does anyone have experience using Pronterface with dual extruders?
Thanks in advance for any help or advice.
Cheers,
Jared
Scott R.
Nov 17, 2013, 7:18:00 PM11/17/13
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Hey Jared,
If you would like Ryan H. and I host a 3D printer meetup once a month at Arch Reactor. The next one is on November 22 at around 7pm. If you would like to see a few printers in action and ask some questions in person we can answer a ton of things there.
Otherwise I can give you a few answers to help point you in the right direction.
The first thing I would suggest is taking a look at the Make's Ultimate Guide to 3D Printing. Its a great resource that shows 23 available machines on the market.
There are also a few different soluble materials on the market. The question is, are you looking for water soluble or chemically soluble?
PVA is one type of water soluble plastic that is on the market. Water soluble plastics are out there but they are a bit finicky to work with because once they are removed from their air tight packaging they begin to absorb moisture in the air around it. Which means that the filament begins to degrade imediately while exposed to the air. One solution to this has been to create an air tight container with plenty of desicent packets inside to help prevent moisture from being absorbed by the PVA. The other issue is that it is also twice the price as normal ABS or PLA per Kilogram.
HIPS (High Impact Polystyrene) is a chemically soluble plastic. You can use Limonene to disolve away the HIPS to reveal a single object that normally couldnt be printed due to extreme overhangs.
HIPS article
If you are looking for dual extrusion machines, there are a number of them out there. For the $3000 range you have a ton of options. Both Makerbot and Ultimaker offer dual extrusion machine within that price range. Makerbot is closed source however while Ultimaker is still open source with its original machine and its new Ultimaker 2. There are also Prusa i3's that can do dual extrusion and many many other open source types of machines. Dual extrusion is limited in part by your software. You can make alot of machine run 2 extruders but you need to have the software that can create slices that work with 2 extruders.
If you have any other questions please feel free to ask!
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