Filament Joining

Soldato
Joined
9 Feb 2009
Posts
3,566
Location
Sunny Fife
Hi,

I've got a lot of part reels so I thought I would try a few of the ways online of joining them together, some went ok....others not so much.

Just wondering if you good people have a good way of doing it?

I have found that a bit of bowden tube with a lighter works ok for me, the problem is that I need help holding the lighter (3 hands job) so if anyone has a good idea for a flame that stays on when not pressed that would be great, I did think about buying a zippo lighter but surely in this day and age there is a better solution?

I bought one of those joining kits but so far I'm useless with it.
 
Been looking at this recently as well but haven’t got round to getting a device. Ideally I wanted something without PTFE.

Work around though is most modern printers you can turn off the filament run out sensor and do a filament change. While printing and it’s very nearly run out you do manual filament change, shouldn’t affect part if you do it at a good time like when it’s doing internal infill.
 
Ah right, yeah I can do that but a lot of prints are done when I'm not near the printer, left overnight it will pause the print but it's time lost. I thought you meant you spliced reels as it was running lol.

I've looked at a few options today, I think I'm going to make a new end for my soldering iron which will hold some bowden tubing, melt it in there and join it that way.....easy peasy eh!
 
Ah right, yeah I can do that but a lot of prints are done when I'm not near the printer, left overnight it will pause the print but it's time lost. I thought you meant you spliced reels as it was running lol.

I've looked at a few options today, I think I'm going to make a new end for my soldering iron which will hold some bowden tubing, melt it in there and join it that way.....easy peasy eh!
I do. Cut the filament before and after the sensor. Push the new filament through the sensor so it never notices it, and then feed the new filament reel into the extruder path as the end of the filament approaches. Done it a load of times, only messed it up once.

But it's probably better to pause and resume if your printer is capable of doing that.
 
Nah no actually joining filament for me. When just about to run out I go into printer settings on screen while it’s running and go to change filament. If it’s recent printer from last few years, it’ll stop, move up out of way of print and to front, purge filament and prompt to load new one, all while keeping bed and hotend warm still.
 
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got marlin installed on my skr2 board that's inside my franken cr10 so can just select filament change from the menu. would try to join the filament to together but if its not aligned properly it could cause a jam and id be a bit annoyed if a multi day print failed.
 
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