Could an extruder like this work?

, scad file in the hot_end.scad.

The pins are there to hold a heat shield, the cylinders that stick out are for heater resistors. The design doesnt have anything for attachment yet, nor something to screw in the bowden tubes. Well, the design is only half-serious. The parameters filled in are rather arbitrary too.. Now i think about it, the design is probably just bad..

I know that the power of the heat flow from the hot end to the cold end should be minimized, so the neck would have to be as thin as possible with still sufficient strength. It would also suck to use this with just a few filaments, lots of wasted energy,

Existing hot/cold ends are from different materials.Probably because you may want different thermal conductivities, high between the heating elements and melt area, and high in the cold end, and low everywhere else. Not sure if 'stickiness' of the materials to the plastic matters.(dont think so) How much trouble do the connections between the materials give though?

The distance between the extruders; smaller is better? It increases the likelyhood that the extruders are at positions where they can usefully extrude. It might also benefit if distances in the infill pattern match the distances between the extruders.

Dont take it too seriously, i just cranked this out in ~1.5h or something..(I should probably be doing something else)

I also remember seeing an idea in the wiki somewhere that basically uses a small conducting ring in glass, and using induction to generate a current, and also the response of it to measure the temperature. If that would work, it would make a tiny melt zone and make the extruder really small.

i think it can work,

But fabrication will be a pain in the a** i think.
any developments?

It seems like it would drag/remelt the printed plastic pretty badly while the head is moving parallel to the line of the extruder nozzles. Also, yeah, even if you use lost PLA casting to turn a FFF printed hotend blank into an aluminum one, the machining to get the taper on all those holes would take a painfully long time. Also, there's not much of a thermal break here, all those heat carts are pretty likely to overwhelm the heatsink if you're not careful. Also, different materials/colors have different melting points (sometimes drastically so), so some of your lines might not fully melt and jam while others might prematurely melt and jam at the same temperature if you're not careful.

Other than that, sure, I guess it would work.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/15/2014 10:09AM by Feign.