Hey friends I'm Devin and today on Make Anything I'm gonna show you how I used
this filament to print this puzzle
and this one
Wild right?
Let's do it!
cool
A couple of months ago I made a video about this Snapmaker 3-in-1 machine here where I tested
out all the various modules. So I laser cut some stuff and I even cnc'd some little nut-buttons for my boy
but the one thing that captured the most attention was actually my own little addition
in this filament color blender and the way this add-on works is it basically holds three Sharpies
so that you can color your filament as it's going into the printer. So with that I took
white filament and was able to make all kinds of really cool complex colored prints
Yeah, it's pretty powerful and like many of you I was absolutely fascinated by this technique
and I couldn't let it go so today's video is all about exploring that technique a bit
further by trying different markers, filaments, and machines to see how far we can take it
and by looking at the table in front of me clearly I've been busy but with all this said I do want to
make it absolutely clear that this isn't my own entirely original idea. In fact, all great ideas
are usually based off of other great ideas and in this case--well--coloring filament with sharpies and
other means has been done for years. For example there's Billie Rubin who started a YouTube channel
relatively recently but I remember something like three years ago she shared a very similar print
on Reddit and I also remember Angus suggesting using spray paint to color filament so there's
all kinds of stuff that's been done and like any great idea it's built off of other great ideas
but hear me out
has anyone ever tried six sharpies
hmm?
i don't know so we're gonna start there that's right the first thing I did was
double the number of Sharpies for my filament blender and that's because it was actually
really easy to do in Fusion 360. All I had to do was double my three color blender
offset it a bit and give it a rotation, cut away any excess bits and then merge it all together so
that I have two blenders stacked right on top of each other. So now I've got this long channel that
the filament feeds through and it's got a Sharpie touching it every 30 degrees all the way around
so I printed that out and stuck it on my Snapmaker once more
fed in the filament and started loading up all the Sharpies. For this first test
I threw in every color of the rainbow just to see what would happen and it was pretty cool
the print definitely has a nice range of color and it kind of looks like the surface of jupiter which
is pretty cool. That said, I'm not sure adding more markers really made the colors more vibrant.
By the way unrelated but this interesting little print is something that a fan named Elias designed and
sent to me and this is a nose flute which you play by breathing out of your nose and using your mouth
as the cavity. I've never heard of this before but it's pretty fun and i'm pretty good at it
Whoops!
Next up I wanted to try replicating one of the Kwob puzzles
I printed with 3 Sharpies to get a really good direct comparison
so I printed out another Kwob using a similar set of colors as the three color version, and well
Here's the original three color version and here's the six color version so there really doesn't seem
to be any improvement in terms of strength of colors
If anything it looks a little lighter but that might be because i threw in some light pink
and other lighter markers i guess the three marker version already got really good coverage on
the outside of the filament so adding more markers
doesn't seem to do that much. But what if we try some different filaments
I had a good feeling about this MatterHackers PRO PLA in Translucent Clear and well the results
speak for themselves.
oh yeah that is a completely stark black print being made with a clear filament
all of that color is coming from just three black markers
as it turns out filament choice might be more important
when it comes to getting strong colors with a filament blender
versus just adding more and more markers
of course when filament runs through your printer it's being melted
and all that sharpie pigment is getting mixed in with the filament
so a lot of the color is actually inside of the print
but if you have a high quality white filament that already has a lot of pigment
you're only going to see the color that's on the very surface
on the other hand if you have a clear filament you can see straight through it
so all of that pigment is going to show and that's why you can get these really dark and strong colors
This Astrolabicon is a great example because both halves were printed with the
same exact settings on the same printer with a single sharpie
using MatterHackers PRO filament
the only difference is i used white filament for one end
and the Transparent Clear filament for the other
and here's that puzzle I printed out using three markers which really evened out the color
giving us this nice dark black tone with just a bit of purple hues at the thinnest areas
so if you're trying to get really strong vibrant colors a clear filament will work the best
but i thought it might be fun to try some translucent colored filaments as well
so with this new discovery I started diving through my filament collection
looking for my best translucent or less opaque filaments that i could experiment with
but i also wanted to experiment with a variety of different markers
so far I've been using this 24 pack of colored Sharpies
but in order to test a few options I just picked up these Shuttle Art markers
which are about half the price as well as these dirt cheap black permanent markers by Amazon Basics
those i basically got to see if i could cut costs but another really interesting set of markers
are these Sharpie Metallic pens.
testing out the various black markers on paper they do look pretty similar
although the Amazon Basics ink is maybe a little bit lighter
though I can't say I noticed a difference with the actual prints
but as I was saying this Metallic Sharpie is super interesting because
just look at the amount of shine that comes off of that
The question is whether my printer can handle that metallic pigment and whether it'll show up in the print
so I immediately loaded up six of these Sharpies and on the way in well we're definitely getting some good metallic coverage
so let's check out our print
I decided to print out one of my Galactops spinning tops
and at first glance it actually looks really nice we're getting a real metallic shine from this
but as I feared this amount of silver pigment did seem to mess with the extrusion
and even when I raised the printing temperature I kept ending up with some really crumbly prints
I was able to get more successful prints by switching back to just
three markers but that also reduces some of the metallic qualities
The pink end here was just printed with the regular Sharpie markers and it looks almost just as shiny
so I'm not sure that those metallic Sharpies are really worth the extra cost and effort to get a good print
even when I tried mixing it in with other colors that metallic quality kind of just got lost
so I think once again this might be better dealt with on the filament end in order to test several
filaments I wanted to test on several printers as well so I jumped back into Fusion 360 and designed
a few different mounts so that I could stick this Sharpie blender on other printers of mine
I started with this little adapter for my Sovoll SV01 printer and their new SV03
and I'm sure there are other printers with a similar extruder setup that this might work for
I got pretty lucky here that it was able to home without the marker hitting the gantry
on the left side so we are having some collision problems on the right here so I am going to have
a reduced area that I can actually print with but besides that everything else seemed to
work just fine and I was able to get colorful extrusions on these great direct drive printers
I also designed this more universal mount that uses a locking nut
so you can mount it on those t-slot aluminum extrusions that so many printers use nowadays
in this case I stuck it on top of my BiQu Thunder which has an Olsson Ruby Nozzle perfect for
printing this glow-in-the-dark PLA by melt.ink
look at that, instant colored filament!
with this setup the filament blender is a bit further removed from the hot end
but that's actually ideal for a bowden setup like this and it doesn't seem like the point of
blending made much of a difference I was still able to get a pretty dramatic color shift from
this filament here's how those came out super 90's-looking and as far as the glowing power well the
Sharpie marker definitely does interfere with that a bit but I still think it's a pretty fun effect
next I fired up my Sovol SV03 to print with this Polyalchemy Elixir filament
this is a super shiny silky filament and with the colors added that shine remains
yeah it seems like going with a shiny filament like this might be a better option for getting
that metallic look compared to using those metallic Sharpies
despite the lack of extra saturation from adding more markers
I do still like using the six color blender just because it gives you so much control
over the fine tuning of the colors you want to create
and by switching out one marker at a time while you're printing it also helps you get slightly smoother gradations
here's a pretty great rainbow I pulled off using that same Pearl Elixir filament
and I also got this pretty nice looking retro style Astrolabicon using this
Paramount 3D skin tone filament and this is just a dirt cheap filament i got off of Amazon
but as it turns out these cheaper filaments seem to work really well for this technique
because there's less pigment this filament was actually one of my favorites I was able
to get a lot of really nice soft colors that look really elegant. I also made these really
crazy striped pieces just by constantly taking the markers in and out of blender while printing
this look is definitely among my favorites using this technique so far
another pretty nice cheap filament was this translucent pink and not necessarily for
its original color but more so for what it can become with this Sharpie blender
I'm especially in love with this look mixing in black sharpie with the pink filament
to get this really interesting and complex color using three sharpies you can get it to be nearly
black but then it still catches glints of a purplish pink in the light and it's just a
really cool look that I've never seen in any commercial filament that you can buy online
here's another fun one printed with the neon translucent green here's the original color
on the top and i just brought in more and more blue to shift it into a darker green which looks
really nice on this end and here I tried mixing in some red to get this kind of orange look as well
for a more subtle effect I quite liked this Ice Blue Transparent PRO PLA mixed with yellow
to bring it more towards green or red to bring it towards purple somehow having the same base color
ties it all together. I also tried that really fun stripy effect with the Ice Blue as well
all in all I'm just blown away by the sheer variety of different looks that you can pull off
using this one technique and despite making all of these I feel like i'm still just scratching the surface
okay so that just about wraps up my latest round of experimentation with this technique
I had so much fun doing it and I've got all these awesome puzzles that i can't wait to put in my shop
As always all these files for making your own Sharpie blenders will be available on My Mini Factory check it out
I can't wait to see all of you put this technique to use
and like I said at the beginning of the video every great idea is built off of other great ideas
so my question for you is how would you take this technique another step forward
I'd love to hear that from you but until next time I'm Devin this is Make Anything and as always, stay inspired!