has anyone made a 3d printer with various sized print heads ans /or the ability to switch between filaments to achieve various colors in the builds?
Have a look at RichRap Blog
that’s pretty cool. I think the ability to change out heads or feed from many heads at once could ad a lot to the capabilities of one of these machines. Having a smaller outlet on the hothead could produce even finer detail.
@John_Weland_Johnny_D you should really have a look at the Reprap Wiki - there are many printer designs that have two or three hotends with independent filament feedstock. Even Makerbot (who this community is not too keen on) offer dual-extruder printers.
(IIRC Makerbot in fact produced the first dual extruder design in reprap history, before they went bad)
I did see the multi-extruder setups but I guess I was envisioning this differently. Something like the cylinder of a revolver that simply moved into place like cycling out tips. I really need a printer so I can get down and get my hands dirty.
In order to accomodate swapping heads, you need a very finely machined device. You need to be able to make sure that when you remove head A and replace it with head B that the printer can either put the new head exactly where the old head was, or compensate for differences automatically. The easiest way to do that is with highly precise machining, which our printers tend not to be.
A revolving head is an interesting idea, but that’s a lot of weight. Moving the extruder off the head would help, but then you’re looking at rotating a bowden cable, also a tricky concept.
The bit i mention about resolution or finer heads is I read were a guy was trying to draw circuitry or PCBs with his printer and it made me think of those copper PCB you can buy and hand draw the paths with a protective marker and then drop the whole deal in a solvent and boom and etched PCB. Well if you have the same copper PCB and a printer that could very finely lay down the protective markings, you could do some pretty intense PCB work. I’m not sure how to tackle the layered PCB though.
thank you sir!