I was getting rid of some spool ends the other day by manually feeding them in while printing. That way I was able to push all these ends past any sensors and into the extruder for uninterrupted printing. It came out fine but was quite tedious.
So this got me thinking: Do any of you guys splice filaments? Not only would this allow for more efficient material use, but I suspect a print made from a bunch of small segments of different colors could look kinda cool.
I’m primarily printing with PETG, so my question is specifically about that, but I’m sure the concept should work for other filaments too.
I have done it back in the day. It’s a real hassle. And I went to the trouble of designing a proper heating and aligning tool to do the job. I could produce a smooth and pretty good splice. The trouble with it was different brands/colors of filament were always iffy about staying welded due to the additives. While it mostly worked, the welds could break just often enough to piss you off. I finally gave up on trying to make a reliable product happen.
Automatically switching spools on runout is the one thing my AMS lite is really, really worth having. It’s why I bought my Mini combo a year ago.