Long version short an idle joke has turned into a serious idea.
I have an Orange Storm coming and, noting that the machine might be not great out of the gate is one thing, but any large format machine is going to have the same problem that large parts are super expensive.
Tossing a pellet extruder on such a machine however sounds like an insane endeavor and well, that’s my brand.
Anyone have ideas on where to even begin researching such a plan? Ive found the ali-express generic units with no tecspecs and that’s about all I can find that aren’t super proprietary.
Is this even worth pursuing either?
Phun food for thought.
A couple of main issues to keep in mind,
Firstly drying, pellets usually need to be dried prior to use. So as I understand it from our caracoal there is an inline drier that is used to dry the pellets at some point before they are extruded.
Second major issue, storage and delivery. If you are doing a major sized print most of the cheap pellet extruders have around a 1kg storage basin which you fill with the pellets and it feeds into the extruder. Issue is that some of these extruders can go through multiple kilos of material per hour meaning you have to refill it all the time. Once again I will refer to our caracoal, as I understand it they are using a sort of vacuum system that is constantly feeding a source of pellets from the bag into the extruder. But you will probably want to look into something that can feed the pellets at a rate equivalent to what the extruder is powering through.
The third big issue is retraction, and by that I mean that you have none. So most overhangs are very difficult if not impossible. The caracoal gets around this (sort of) by printing at a 45 degree. But this will not really be possible with the orangestorm.
Idk, thats my 2.578 cents on the topic.
So probably a “fun science experiment” at best? Obviously a bit concerned about the running costs of this machine provided it actually gets off the ground. I think 1 roll was around what I pay for a case normally :yikes:
Course not entirely sure just how many multi-kg projects I have coming either…
Yeah I would consider it an experiment of sorts, if it works all the better. But if not then it was interesting to try out