huh hello uh tonight i am going to be spending a few minutes
playing with this cheap little filament splicer that i got in the last mailbag
basically what it does is it just holds the filament in alignment
through these two grooves here and just tighten it down with the allen key so that it clamps in place
and then you insert one piece of filament in through this end which is just a little
metal hole which is theoretically the right size for the filament
and then the other one comes in from the other side here through a little teflon block which is
drilled out just a hair larger than the filament this one on this side is closer to the size of the
filament but it's still a little bit bigger and basically you apply heat in the middle
and then you push it through into the teflon block to cool
and then when you push it out to the other side they come out joined now the listing that i bought
this from suggested that the heat method that it wants you to use is called burn it with fire
basically heat up two pieces of filament like that shove them in there let them cool for a second
and they come out spliced i didn't let that cool long enough but you'll notice when it comes out
the other end that the splice is a little bit thicker than the filament which is not
ideal because if you're using a really skinny bowden tube especially the capricorn stuff
it will jam up so any demonstration videos that i've seen of this thing c2 sort of prune it
down a little bit until it's the right size so i am going to spend some time doing that
with these random pieces of filament now some of this is just the roll-ins from filament that i've
already bought some of it most of it is from a lot that i got a long long time ago with a 3d pen
and i assume it's just the tail-ends from manufacturing or whatever they
decided to package up into you know five meter lengths and sell for 3d pen users and one of those
in the 3d pen is what i use to make the stand that this guy has been sitting on for a very long time
you didn't even notice it there did you it's not the greatest filament in the world i don't think
but for this experiment if i waste it i don't think it'll be any loss of material i think i've
got it working more or less reasonably first thing i've noticed is if you cut the filaments
at a bit of an angle it gives you more contact more surface area in there and the second thing
you may notice is that i'm using a different heat source a little bit more controllable
using my heat gun in this professional looking uh rig back here to hold it all together
turn the heat gun on for a couple of seconds
until everything gets a little bit melty shut it off goop those two together
shove them in let them cool in there like you're supposed to for a little while
and then just use my knife to do a little bit of pruning
until it'll fit out through the right hand side there
and there we go if it fits through there it'll fit through my bowden tube
just spool it up onto there pick another color and carry on
sometimes it just seems to help to rather than carving with the knife just to sort
of smooth out the edges a little bit and then it should fit through
yeah it'll fit through there and if it'll fit through there as i said it should fit through
the bowden tube now just grab another color and carry on with the same trick over and over again
all right i've got this finally put together so let's see if we can make it print i hope it will
although i suspect it may jam up on the transitions there's only one way to find out
so
so here it is the result of that first print it's pretty good actually
and there's a few issues but that stringing that's nothing to do with the
splicing that's stringing over there that's just the filament this here is a bit of an issue
got some separation and lifting on that blue layer on the bottom there you see that
so since i had filament left on that spool i made another one
and just carried on from where i left off on the first one let's see the color there
and there was more of that same blue in here and it didn't even stick to itself i mean
here it wasn't sticking properly to the bed but here it's not sticking to itself but that's not
causing problems at the layer changes or the the color changes the only other problem when
the transition from the green to the light blue came in or was about to uh come in that join
snapped and at the time it was printing this layer down here see that little gap there fortunately i
was in the room and i quickly raced over and just jammed it into the extruder until it grabbed again
until the blue grabbed and then it carried on printing the green printed the blue
the blue as i said appears to be really crap filament but that was the only problem that i had
with spices and i'm thinking it's because this blue filament because i've got two examples of
it being crap filament so i'm gonna put it down to that but these other splices none of them let
go there's something so much fun and i had so much filament left over i thought i'd start a third one
and you can see again it carries on just right from there and this one was turning out
excellent this dark blue worked great it looks really good too and i mean there's no
there's no stringing down here these ones i mean look at all that stringing on the
tail there that's horrible um and the light blue on the bottom this one's all stringing
i'm i'm just ragging on that light blue filament it's it's pretty crappy fortunately
it was part of that uh sample pack that i got so i don't have much of it around here it's
not much of a waste to throw it out because it's junk anyway this one was going good until i went
over there to take a look and bump the cable in the raspberry pi and stop the print damn it
anyway i think these little calibration cats all look pretty good and most importantly
this thing did its job it was a bit of a pain in the ass to use it's kind of frittery but
it did do the job now then the splices were larger than they should have been
and i i did my best to prune them down if i was using a capricorn or some other bowden tube that
has really skinny inside diameter uh that's super tight to the 1.7 millimeter then i don't think i
could have gotten away with it but i've got the stock bowden tube for my ender 3v2 on there right
now which is a little bit sloppier on the inside diameter but in this case that was a good thing it
let me get away with having these splices in there so there you go the spicing actually works
um would i recommend this uh this little splicing tool i'm not sure like i said it is
kind of frittery to use but once you get the hang of it it's not too horrible and using the heat gun
with a narrow little nozzle rather than a lighter give me a lot more control over what i was doing
so i think i would recommend going that way if you're going to get one of these things anyway
thanks for watching uh that was just a quick exploration of a fairly simple little tool
and cheap too um questions or comments down below as usual uh thanks for watching i will
talk to you later oh yeah somebody's gonna ask this is uh mcclellan's eyelid scotch
no age statement on it it's just a nice nice basic inexpensive single malt good stuff