My multi-color/-material printers

[spegelius]

Yeah multi-color and -material printing is a bit of hassle no matter what setup you are using. The Prusa ecosystem is the most complete setup AFAIK since it brings the HW and SW together and the HW is full package. Still it's nowhere near an easy thing to work with, especially when things go wrong. Also I still need to get used to PrusaSlicer, so far I've only used KISSlicer and my own filament change post prosessing script, because it's more configurable regards the filament change procedure.

Ultimakers apparently have dual extrusion capability and I suppose their ecosystem is a full package also, but I don't have any experience about those machines. Downsides: only 2 materials and the price. Would love to try one, though I would probably miss the tinkering part .

What soluble material do you have? There seems to be some options nowadays and also support materials that aren't soluble, but still easy to remove. I've only tested PVA and BVOH, both solubles. BVOH is the better one so far, although I bought a new roll of PVA, hopefully it works better than the old crap I've been testing lately...

Hope you don't have too many soluble layers, gonna be a PITA to swap filaments manually every couple of layers

BTW when MMU is working, it seems to work quite stable. This is PLA benchy print with 5 different colors and PLA brands. Couple of feeding issues right at the beginning of the print, but those were due to white filament breaking in pieces for some reason and I needed to remove the broken parts. After that no interruptions. But the amount of purge... and print time near 20h with all the filament changes, MMU is quite slow on that regard. And finally the color bleed with this one is quite bad, even more purge would be needed to get the colors clean.