This is cool.
I'm gonna show you how I made it, and I'm also going to show you some other tricks I
found along the way.
Let's go!
The inspiration for this video came a while ago actually, if you're a long time subscriber
to the channel you'll maybe remember I bought a geeeeeetech A20m in around november I think
last year.
It's a two colour printer, and what I noticed is if you put in two colours and set it to
mix, you get this.
So let's kind of explore why.
This phenomenon (doo doo doo doo doo) is actually called co-extrusion and it's frankly a rabbit
hole, but to give you the layman TLDR version, smushing two filaments in like shown will
create an interface between the two materials.
How much they mix is down to fluid dynamics and something known as the reynolds number,
and for something as viscous as melted PLA that's going to be not much mixing at all.
The bottom line is, if you put two filaments in and layer them side to side you will by
the nature of the science involved always get this coextrusion effect.
Always.
Whether it's a bug or a feature is down to your personal opinion.
So in the comments of that video I was challenged to coextrude coextruded filament.
It was new back then and it's taken me ages to get hold of some, mainly because it's so
expensive and buying 4 reels for one video was a bit prohibitive.
But thankfully that time has finally come and I have here the most striking coextruded
filament I've seen.
This is a 4 pack of matt coextruded PLA and if you want it, you can actually support the
channel by clicking the link below.
It's good stuff - I print with eryone a lot because it's cheap and I have no issues with
it, but now they also have this fancy stuff!
So anyway where were we - yes, coextruding coextruded extruded...extrusion.
Well first up this is what you get when you just print this stuff on a normal printer.
If indeed you can call the FLSUN SR a normal printer.
This effect is cool...
...but we can do better.
coextruded plus a single colour seems to work well.
coextruded plus coextruded is what you all wanted to see.
But I'm sorry to disappoint.
It's okay.
The choice of colours probably factors in but also if you think about what you're doing,
with the alignment of the two filaments, it's probably sub optimal.
And you can't really choose the way the filaments align, with the bowden tubes.
I guess.
But we have another trick up our sleeve of course - the a20m is a full mixing hotend
meaning it can vary the proportions as well as just 50/50 the two colours.
The firmware allows you to specify a gradient, with a start and finish height.
These look really cool
And of course you can put the two coextruded filaments in this way and gradually switch
from one side to the other and you get this
So next....we're not done yet - is something you can do at home, and shout out to filament
stories for bringing this one to my attention.
You can print filament.
It actually works surprisingly well - this is insane.
But with one huge caveat - the printer has to support being told to stop halfway.
And I say that because most ender clones in my experience dont do that on stock firmware
! why!
Oh
if you're wondering whether you can print filament all in one go with the mixing nozzle
- no - I mean I'm not going to try to analyse it but for some reason this activates physics
defying mixing mode and you get this.
meh.
I printed something with the filament I made too.
I found it quite...inconsistent to say the least.
The problem is that dyes don't seem to react together the way you expect them to, and one
colour can really dominate even with the coextrusion phenomenon, I can't say I understand why,
I guess the dye or pigment is migrating or something.
I found it very hard and tedious to get any colour combinations that would work well.
So I guess the moral of the story is, it depends what you're after, but coextruding your own
filament seems to give quite different results to buying stuff like this eryone.
Also I would advise some caution with silk filament, I guess due to a phenomenon known
as die swell, the filament appears to be larger than it should, and I had a lot of trouble
with filament mixes that included silk getting jammed in the bowden and hotend, leading to
underextrusion or just non extrusion.
You could compensate, sure, but it starts getting complicated.
Finally - one of the channel patrons asked if I would look into printing this with the
coextruded filaments, it's an optical illusion.
I tried and it didn't really work well, but when we discussed it, it seems this is down
to the direction the wall is made, for the best effect you need to not reverse direction.
I looked at mattercontrol, which is a slicer by matterhackers, I've never used it before,
didn't know it existed to be honest, but it does fix the issue and didnt take too long
to get a result that was far superior.
Apparently though I could have just used prusaslicer, because all outer walls are anticlockwise,
so I heard?
Oh well.
So that is probably enough for one episode, if you have any more mad suggestions then
put them in the comments, if you tried anything and found you got a cool effect then also
put it in the comments, also check out our discord with 300 members near enough now,
and if you want to support the channel and help me buy more weird filaments then there's
a patreon link and whatnot down below, and I will see you next time!
Thank you for watching.