Dual head printing

#1

Hi there,

Today i tried for the first time to use both the extruders. I have same colour on both cartridges so i decided to use one of them for support only…The result is a catastrofe. Its impossible to do this there is oozing all over the place and the print gets a totall mess really fast. Anyone had luck printing with the two heads at the same time? Whats the secret? I think the learning curve for one extruder is considerable and thats why this issue was not raised before…everyone is still truggling to get decent prints with only one extruder…But…I paid for a two headed printer…And im concerned i wont get any benifit in having choosen the two extruder option…

What your experience with this guys?

#2

My only test with dual extruder is calibration test.

As we can see, borders are not clean but other part seem acceptable.

Your two nozzle are well height align ?
http://zimsupport.zeepro.com/support/solutions/articles/5000519687-how-to-adjust-both-nozzles-height-

#3

I printed some parts with dual extrusion mainly for creating a support structure which I then removed via warm water, NaOH or Limonene depending on the material.
Dual extrusion can be VERY tricky but to avoid oozing you could “simply” increase the suck after a tool change: helps A LOT!

Usually PLA also does oozze more than ABS, but with the Zeepro nozzles I already tried 10mm retract (it was PVA on this 10mm) and it worked well.

…took me hours of testing but the problem is - even if there is a problem - only on the software side and not on the hardware side. :blush:

#4

Kingmatin where is the option to do the 10mm retract?

#5

I stopped working with the Zeepro Software as it was too limiting for my purposes: really don’t know if it is possible to increase the suck of the filament… :-/

#6

Does anyone know exactly what is X/Y offset value between right and left extruders ?

#7

I use x=15mm y=1mm in simplify3d. Works well for me, not sure if it is exact, but it is very close.

Btw, if you start doing dual extrusion, I’m curious how your ooze shields turn out. When I use simplify3d to slice, the ooze shield stutters and prints blobs while printing. It still works , but doesn’t look like a smooth extrusion as I expect. The model still prints fine though, so I haven’t worried about it too much. It seems like the extrusion rate is different for the ooze shield or something.

#8

Btw, that’s +15mm and +1mm for tool 1, leaving tool 0 at 0 and 0.

I figured out my stuttering issue with the ooze shield. I had the speed set too high. If you encounter this issue, you can adjust the simplify3d -> Additions -> Ooze Shield -> Speed Multiplier. I had to drop mine way down to 25% (where my default printing speed is set to 40 mm/s). Seems to work ok now.

#9

Offset value in our firmware (configuration.h) :

/////// GRISE///////////////
#define EXTRUDER_OFFSET_X {0.0, -15} // (in mm) for each extruder, offset of the hotend on the X axis
#define EXTRUDER_OFFSET_Y {0.0, -1.7} // (in mm) for each extruder, offset of the hotend on the Y axis

2 Likes
#10

I just measured 15mm x 1.7mm. I had not worked out whether they were positive or negative yet. Thanks for posting that Eric, although it’s interesting that yours are negative and jpod’s are positive. Perhaps it’s just a difference in the software. Guess I’ll have to try them and see. What do you suppose is the best way to test the results? I guess I could just print the traffic cone…

#11

How about something like this:

#12

I tried the offsets as -15, -1.7, and printed this model: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1023194
While it’s not printing very well in general, I was able to at least show that the offsets are correct in Slic3r and Cura.