Big Builder Dual Feed (Piece of Sh**t) Duet Conversion

wmschultz

Hey Everyone,

A friend of mine gave me a Big builder Dual feed 3d printer the other day because he thought it was broken, anyways I got it working but I hate it. It's got no heated bed, one nozzle to blend 2 filaments with two DD extruders strait outa china that jam every second print; and the print quality sucks but granted I haven't really played around with the settings.

I've got a ton of water-cooling parts laying around because I've built a couple of PCs in the past and have kinda wanted to build a liquid cooled RepRap with a heated chamber so I can print stuff like PEEK and PEI–and have an excuse to buy Slice's new Mosquito Liquid extruder (S*xy looking piece of Hardware).

Anyway....Does anyone have any experience cannabalizing Sh*tty proprietary printers to turn them into a RepRap with duet? This piece of junk has got good bones I feel, but its old and wasn't really built for the uses that I'm into.

This is my first post so pls be nice to me and don't make fun of my hopes and dreams, I've never built a reprap before but I've done plenty of mods to my ultimakers like tool changing and bioextrusion (I'm a Biotech geek) and have got nothin but time on my hands these days with COVID ringing everyones bell and all.

I'll attach a picture of this dinosaur so you guys know what i'm talking about, its made by Builder, terrible company ive sent them a ton of Customer support inquiries and never heard back. Just so you guys know what im dealing with this printer was designed to run on Cura 3.2 or something, pretty sure they're on like 4.8 now.

(Ew gross)(https://www.treatstock.com/static/uploads/printers/big-builder-01.jpg)
(Another one)(https://www.3dhubs.com/talk/uploads/db5060/original/2X/9/930fde4535b017eff1dd18c8f6dc84a820b9568f.jpg)

Thanks,
W (Thats my slick codename to make things personal but keep em anonymous yknow)

Phil Maddox

Can be very frustrating i know . The main issues I've had with the clone stuff is the machining quality. the biggest problem I've experienced is the heat breaks ( e3D style) The quality of the internal bores are terrible and can cause constant jams on the "all metal" heat breaks. Less so on the PTFE lined ones but there the exact length of the PTFE tube is critical. Gaps allow an accumulation of filament
Dual feed single nozzle is also tricky and Ive never really got that to work reliably . I ended up converting to dual feed dual nozzle.

Good luck

dc42

@Phil-Maddox said in Big Builder Dual Feed (Piece of Sh**t) Duet Conversion:

Dual feed single nozzle is also tricky and Ive never really got that to work reliably

@deckingman has has success with the Diamond 3- and 5-in 1-out hot ends. His experience may transfer to other multiple input single output hot ends. Some of the key points are:

Always load all inputs with filament, otherwise you will get backflow to the unused inputs.
Keep all filaments moving. When extruding, never set the mix to be 100% of one filament, always have at least a few percent of each filament.
Use firmware retraction. Then RRF will retract all filaments by the same amount, regardless of the mix ratio.

deckingman

@wmschultz You could take a look at my YouTube Channel and blog - links in my signature.

As DC said, I have been using Diamond mixing hot ends for a number of years but more recently have been trying to develop my own 6 input mixing hot end. I've used Mosquito heat breaks (but all metal heat breaks are not good for mixing hot ends which might have loaded but static filament - excellent for any other type of hot end where all loaded filaments keep moving forward).

I currently have 3 hot ends under development - all are water cooled.

One is a single input standard type of Chinese crap. The second is the 6 input mixing hot end with PTFE lined heat breaks. The third is a dual input, all metal hot end designed to always have a mixing ratio of 0.5:0.5 such that both filaments are always moving forward. This latter version is an "E3D volcano killer" but it uses modified Slice Engineering parts. For reasons of intellectual property rights, I can't publish much about it.