Just did my first ever filament change!

That's it really, first time ever and even did it during the print :-)

I appreciate that it's probably not that difficult but I'm happy I got away with it haha

Great. This is somethign I've been wondering about. How do you go about using the last bit of the spool? Do you just sit and watch as it pulls the last bit through and feed in the next piece somehow? Do you pause the printing somehow and pull out the old and insert the new? Do you just have to predict that what's left on the roll won't make it and swap it out before starting a print?

Thanks for helping out a newbie.

There may be a better way, but I paused the print then dropped the extruder temp to 70 deg, disabled the motors and pulled out the old filament. Then pushed the new one in until it stopped as usual and heated the extruder up again. I raised the z axis by 10mm and extruded a bit until i could see the nozzle oozing, lowered 10mm again and resumed print. It carried on fine!

I didn't really plan the change, the print was using a lot of filament so it was either bin the print or have a bash at a mid-print change.

If anyone can advise a better way of doing it, I'd be interested to know!

You can join filaments together with a bit of heat or acetone. Not that I have tried this, but shouldn't be too hard!

Interesting idea to join the filaments together. I'd be afriad that my "melt point" would make it too wide and it wouldn't feed through the hot end. Maybe if I went through and sanded it down and measured to make sure it was a perfect match, but that seems like an awful lot of trouble. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone has a good technique for joining them as it would allow you to leave the printer while it was printing that part rather than having to wait for it to hit the end of the filament so you can make the trade.

I've tried joining filament together with heat or acetone and have had very mixed success. The trick is to be careful with handling the joined filaments because it breaks apart easily. I stopped doing this when I realized that I can just gently push the next feed behind the previous feed into the extruder without interrupting the print. This works if your extruder has a channel that guides the filament into the filament drive and the filament drive is the hobbed type. The trick in this case is to bevel the edge on the new filament so it doesn't get caught on the way in and to hold the new filament away from the extruder so that you don't end up pushing the extruder and nozzle into the part being printed.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/18/2013 07:01PM by brnrd.