Has anyone ever tried to purge a color mixing hotend inside of the print instead of printing a separate tower? I’d imagine this would be much more efficient?
@Javier_Prieto does that. Seems to work as long as you don’t have any translucent filaments
It’s not reliable. As you get near the top, many shapes (especially the organic ones that you’re likely to want multiple colors for) get narrower, and may not have enough layer area for the purge to complete. And, of course, you can’t switch to using a tower to purge if you haven’t been building one the whole time.
You can do it but you may have a surprise when finishing the printing if you dont have enough perimeters to purge the color
Ah yeah, completely slipped my mind the fact that small layer areas would eliminate this possibility.
I made a modified CuraEngine that generated a priming tower where only the color changing infills were generated- worked reasonably well, so long as I made sure the walls were double line thick
Do you have to purge using a tower? Can’t you just do the infill purge unless there’s not enough infill and then just dump on the side and wipe?
The machine would have to be equipped with a dump point and wiper. Most are not, and some machine geometries (like deltabots) make it difficult to add them.