State of Mixing Hotends?
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Does anyone have insight into what is currently out there and whether any designs are viable for color or material mixing?
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@jpomo10 they exist, mixing materials is afaik still not something that works ok, mixing colors works to some degree. @deckingman have a lot of experience with 5 input mixing diamond + he made his own design of a mixing hotend that actually mixes the filament and not just push them one next to another (if you check out his blog you can find a ton of useful info, amongst it you can see that most currently available "mixing" hotends have issue he called "toothpaste stripe effect" as filaments are not really mixed ... but head on to his blog, you have few days at least worth of study there before you have additional questions not already answered there
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@jpomo10 said in State of Mixing Hotends?:
Does anyone have insight into what is currently out there and whether any designs are viable for color or material mixing?
I saw my name mentioned above.
There are currently no commercially available mixing hot ends that truly mix (if there was, I would love to know where I can buy one). Without exception, they all "combine" filaments together and they all suffer from the "stripey toothpaste" effect. One other big problem they all suffer from is heat creep from those filaments which are loaded but not moving forward during any particular part of the print. It doesn't matter how efficient the heat break is at preventing heat from being conducted through the metal parts if heat conducts up through the filament itself. Of the one or two designs that I've seen working with some sort of stirrer or paddle inside the mixing chamber, I note that none have been marketed. From what I've seen, they seem to mix but are poor at doing multi part objects. I don't know but I suspect that not being able to relieve the nozzle pressure for non-print moves could be an issue. Normal "retraction" probably won't work with that design of mixing chamber.
There are things that can be done to mitigate some of the problems (using transparent filament for example, and using lined heat breaks as opposed to "all metal"). But currently, there are no commercially available mixing hot ends that do what they claim (i.e. mix) But I'm working on it.................
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Thanks for the feedback, i've been following your progress now!
I'm still mulling this over and recently came across this video for a 3 in 1 out hotend that looks fairly standard but seems to have some inserts at the end of each heartbreak. I don't know if this set up works, but it seemed strange enough to mention here.
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@jpomo10 That's interesting - but I don't speak German. I've seen nozzles with that sort multi-hole input design. Might be worth playing around with...........
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