Imagine a four-year-old shouting orders in a design lab. In response to the question of how to make a 3D printer print in colour, that kid might yell, “Just colour it with markers!” This week, at the Inside 3D Printing conference in Sao Paolo, Argentinian 3D printer manufacturer, Kikai Labs, has done just that, yielding quite a novel solution to the problem of FDM colorization.
Kikai Labs president, Marcelo Ruiz Camauer, gave a talk at the Inside 3D Printing conference, outlining the current methods for creating multi-colour prints. For the time being, the best printing technologies for achieving a range of colours are 3D Systems’ ProJet line, Stratasys’ Connex3 or 3D paper printing from Mcor. These machines, however, are extremely expensive. Desktop FDM/FFF machines are much cheaper, but are pigmentally constrained because they rely on the extrusion of plastic filaments, often limiting the number of colours to the number of extruders on a machine, and only achieving a layered multi-colour effect.
That doesn’t mean that people haven’t tried to expand FDM/FFF’s colour capabilities. One method has relied on dying clear filament as it makes its way to the extruder, as seen in the Spectrom adapter created by a couple of University of Wisconsin students. Then, there’s BotObjects, which claims to melt a series of CMYK filaments as they enter into the extruder and mix them together, though I’m still pretty sceptical that they can pull this off, parts still only demonstrate a layered effect to date. There is also RichRap’s tie-dying [Keep reading…]
Source: 3DPrintingIndustry.com