I don’t think it’s a good idea to buy a new printer knowing you’re going to immediately “upgrade” it with new extruder(s). For a start it’ll almost certainly invalidate any warranty that comes with it, and there’s really no guarantee you’ll get the quality you were hoping for. We all upgrade every now and again, but it should be something you do when you know it’s needed from experience.
I would also say that buying a dual headed printer merely to save time changing filaments is a false saving. You only need to change filaments when you have to, and it only takes 2 minutes, perhaps less, but everything you print will be carrying the weight of those two heads and if you’ve got a reasonable range of colours/materials you’ll probably be changing filament anyway a lot of the time.
From the studies I have done and talking to others and using about 5 different printers, the Lulzbot line is very nice and very capable. Have you had a look at that at all?
Yes, it is much higher in price than the other printers. It does however give you a 2-3" (50-75mm) additional volume in each axis. The older Taz 5 is lower in price now (about $1,800) compared to the Taz 6’s ($2,500).
The Prusa has an upgrade kit to auto calibrate all 3 axis AND a kit for multiple extruders!
i started with a “closed” Afinia 3D printer thinking that I wanted a plug and play experience… once I lost the fear, I started hacking the printer to do other materials, etc.
then I bought a e3d BigBox dual kit.
great machine but still been developed. 100%hands on, tweak till you die kind of deal.
if I could start all over and had to choose just one printer: Prusa I3 with an e3d v6 extruder and a PEI bed mated to Simplify 3D software is the best personal 3D printer you can buy.
I concur. I switch filaments all the time with 1 extruder and it takes less than 2 minutes to do. I haven’t found a need for 2 extruders other than dissolvable supports. Then again, If you have your support settings correct, you shouldn’t need dissolvable supports in most, practical, cases.
If you are producing parts for customers, dual extrusion is a lifesaver. I have probably printed less than 10 two color prints and have only had a couple of dual extrusion orders, but having an extra extruder to switch over to when the feed or nozzle is having an issue is amazing. Having a backup extruder is the real benefit of dual extrusion.
I just bought the Prusa and the 4 color mod, this will make 5 printers now. I have to say I like dual extruder because I can do PLA on the left and ABS on the right with little headache.
3-D printing has progressed over the last decade to include multi-material fabrication, enabling production of powerful, functional objects. While many advances have been made, it still has been difficult for non-programmers to create objects made of many materials (or mixtures of materials) without a more user-friendly interface.
But this week, a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present “Foundry,” a system for custom-designing a variety of 3-D printed objects with multiple materials.
In traditional manufacturing, objects made of different materials are manufactured via separate processes and then assembled with an adhesive or another binding process. Even existing multi-material 3-D printers have a similar workflow: parts are designed in traditional CAD [computer-aided-design] systems one at a time and then the print software allows the user to assign a single material to each part.
In contrast, Foundry allows users to vary the material properties at a very fine resolution that hasn’t been possible before.
It’s like Photoshop for 3-D materials, allowing you to design objects made of new composite materials that have the optimal mechanical, thermal, and conductive properties that you need for a given task
