A lot, as we all know… I don’t really get why any filament producer has come yet with a serious solution for this.
I was just thinking: could this problem be solved with the same solution that was introduced in headphone design, that is haveing a flat wire rather than a circular one?
Could filament be extruded flat rather than rounded? and also would it be possible to adapt the nozzle to a new form factor?
Hey @Francesco_P excelent question, I’ve wondered the same thing myself for a long time.
To my knowledge there are at least 3 interesting innovations I’ve seen on the filament side, please allow me to elaborate them briefly:
Pallet Extrusion Printing, a new breed of 3D Printers where pellets are extruded directly in the machine, check out the Sculptify 1 David printer and ColorFabb’s pellet selection
The Fabbster 3D Printer uses injection molded strips of plastic that connect to each other, and a have a ribbed sides where two gears grip the strip to offer more control
The third development is melting pieces of filament together prior to printing, I think we’ll see more of these upgrades and add-ons appear next to our beloved desktop printers. Here’s an early prototype 1 and a user friendly desktop product made by Mosaic Manufacturing.
I’m very curious to hear other developments that might help preventing tangling as well as any best practices that printer owners have found.
Yes pellets would be ideal, I am just wondering if the “extruder” in that case woul be able to guarantee a costant material flow trough the nozzle without allowing any air “gap” in the extrusion (wich I think could be very possible using pellets…)
Fabbster solution is really close to what I was looking for! this demonstrate that it would be possible to produce a flat filament and then extrude it trough a regular nozzle.
Yes I have seen Mosaic and I can’t wait to see it on the market! Although the tangled filament could also occour using this method…
I have also seen many components on thingiverse that try to solve this problem but I have never relly tried one… has anybody any experience on this?
Obviously the nozzle will be rounded at its end (otherwise it would print like a marker!)but It would allow a flat filmanet to get in from the extruder…
An interesting idea in theory, but the practical execution would be a nightmare.
Using a flat headed filament would require entirely new hardware throughout all our machines to accept a new shape, and then we have to consider how the rectangular geometry affect flow dynamics in the nozzle when being printed. It will be slower and harder to convert etc etc etc
Really the issue of tangled filament comes down to buying cheap/crappy filament and not using the right contingencies to coutner this. The ultimaker 2 for example has a very very basic fix to tangled filement by adding an extra little arm the filament latches onto before feeding in to the bowden, this give the filament breathing room, and if there is a knot, this is then usuall avoided as a result.
alternatively, we should look at changing the shape of our reels from circular to eliptical/oblong, and the way the filament is fed onto the reels could learn a lot from how guitar pickups are made!
