Flex material and water soluble supports  

Re: Flex material and water soluble supports

According to the MMUs 3d Printing Handbook (Version 1.01):

"MMU2 supports the most common materials (such as PLA, PETG and ABS) along with soluble materials (BVOH) from the start.
....we are working on expanding the range of supported materials (Flex and PVA+ coming soon)."

hope that ansers your question 🙂

Re: Flex material and water soluble supports

Yes yes... so you will have a spurge tower, right?

Re: Flex material and water soluble supports

I do not have the MMU, but in my humbly opinion the MMU is maybe great for multi-color prints, but very limited for printing different materials.

Purging the nozzle becomes more critical and the biggest issue IMHO is the fact that the nozzle has to change temperature everytime if you have materials with different printing temperature.

Re: Flex material and water soluble supports

I tried soluble material but the result is not good.
I used eSun PVA, it caused lot of stringing and really not that soluble.
Stringing causes jamming.

May be other brand of PVA is better. Like to know other's experience too.

Re: Flex material and water soluble supports

Verbatim BVOH works ok with stock settings. But you need to print it out of a box with humidity below 10%.

Re: Flex material and water soluble supports

I plan to print PrimeSelect PVA+ from a drybox if Prusa would ever release a profile for it.

(its sold from their website - I left a comment, made a forum post, made a github issue)

Re: Flex material and water soluble supports

The hardware design is capable of handling real multi material with completely different print settings. But the software is not there, yet. For example the temperature switch is currently happening during ramming/cooling and obviously causing issue there. Slic3r developer are working already on it so I expect to see it working in the future.
Regarding TPU, I think it depends which grade. The softer ones will most likely not survive the current load/unload speeds but again, this is software controlled and solvable over time. At the end it's the same direct extrude like on regular MK3.

Re: Flex material and water soluble supports

I hope they solve this soon. I have some PVA and I am really looking forward to using it with the MMU 2 on our Mk3.

Re: Flex material and water soluble supports

I am also looking forward for some improvement in the area of soluble materials...

Currently, the PrimaSelect PVA+ they sell from their website advertised as "Tested and recommended as soluble supports for our Multi Material upgrade." is totally unuseable. Funilly, when I wrote once support, I got an answer along the lines of "well, it works with the same settings as BVOH just with lower temperatures, but I never used it.". After getting inspiration from Chris Warkocki's blogs I spent quite some time trying to tweak, but after half a roll of the somewhat expensive stuff was in the bin, I gave up...
And then the (sinfully expensive...!) BVOH does not seems to be that much better suited. Initial testing got better tips than those of PVA, but should I really spend another half spool of expensive materials, trying to tweak something, just to find that it won't work anyways...?

After all, I did NOT buy the MMU (when it was still the MMU, not V1, not V2, not MMU2, just MMU) to print different colours. I strongly believe that a brush with some high-quality paint is better suited for that job, especially with the very few different colours of filaments available.
I need to print technical parts that need to be precise in shape and measurements, and soluble-materials is the way to go. But the way things are headed right now, the stl's from last february might be just a tad longer in storage...

Well, off to print some more mono-material-parts with a multi-material-machine... 😕