Has anyone tried putting both a large and small nozzle on a dual extrude and using the large nozzle for fill and the small nozzle for walls/fine details? Will the slicer software even support this?
Paul
Hi pbreed, I have honestly not been daring enough to try this, but to find those settings in Slic3r you can go to Printer Settings and set “extruders” to 2. Then you can set the nozzle diameters for each independently. Cura does not support this.
You should message mushoo I know s/he is running a dually with a volcano on one of the nozzles
Hey I see my name there!
I’ve got the Volcano (1.2mm) on one nozzle, and a regular E3Dv6 at .6mm on the other nozzle. I mainly use the .6 for support structures, at this point (I’m somewhat unhappy with the amount of calibration - and the likelihood of that calibration going OUT of calibration easily - with the current Lulz dually setup).
I use Simplify3D essentially exclusively. It’s very easy to set a print job with that to use the smaller nozzle for perimeters and the larger one for infill. But, unless you’ve got a lot of <90° angles in your print, not really worth the effort I find. The other thing to note is, your layer is lowest-common-denominator. I can’t have a layer height of 1mm and expect the .6mm nozzle to fill that space! If I’m using the .6mm nozzle at all, even just for perimeters or supports, my max layer height is about .5mm.
Now, having been running it this way for a while, there’s a number of slicer improvements I thought of that will probably never happen (too small of a use-case scenario). Namely, dynamic layer heights would be awesome! It’d be great if I could make my perimeters be .1mm, and my infill 1mm. Simplify3d actually does sort of allow for this, I haven’t experimented with it much though. You essentially say ‘infill only every X layers.’ I generally really like S3D, but there’s a few other problems I have with it - the way it handles the interface between a bridging area and an infill area is annoying. It seems to use a predetermined spacing for where to start bridging, I’d rather be able to tell it to start far back into the model when it begins the ‘bridge.’ Same goes for the interface between solid infill (top/bottom layers) and non-solid (0-99%) infill - again, it does it riiight at the edge, which often looks crummy. But overall, S3D is great with dual extruders.