RepRapPro founder and instigator of the RepRap movement, Adrian Bowyer, has done to multimaterial 3D printing what RepRap does best: keep it neat and simple. Fellas and fellers out there will tell you that the only way to do multimaterial FDM/FFF 3D printing is with multiple heads (barring all sorts of experimentation and, possibly, unsubstantiated hype). Bowyer, with the help of a RepRapPro customer, has come up with a method for multi-material 3D printing with a single extruder.
The idea, originated by Bowyer’s customer Dr Michael Fairhurst, is, in Bowyer’s words, “to treat the filament as a railway train approaching points, and to design the filament path to allow filaments to merge into a single hot end.” The RepRap founder implemented Fairhurst’s concept by locking three Bowden tubes into a printed component, specially designed for the purpose, that joins the filament to a single printhead.…
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