Hey gang! Tim here from Core Electronics and today I'm going to talk about the Ultimaker dual Extruders and what they can do for you and the advantages that they can give.

So, the Ultimaker dual extrusion 3D printing guide, so this you can find on the Core Electronics website, easily accessible just underneath the tutorial. There's a couple of things to remember when using Dual Extruders, so let me give an overview Dual Extruders give you the capacity to print with different materials on the single print. It's not going to allow you to print twice as quickly but it will let you print different kinds of support material and it will also let you print different colours easier than if you’re using a single dual extruder, the dual extruder works on the Ultimaker by swapping between different nozzles, you'll be able to see that the extruder on all of the Ultimaker has opened up and these nozzle over here will bounce, this one in fact this one over here will bounce up and down and the Ultimaker knows where that tip of that nozzle is so that will allow you to print the different materials.

Materials like plastics they don't like to connect to other plastic materials that have different properties, it's usually poor engineering to try and put different plastics together which don't share similar properties. Ultimaker gives recommendations and also talks about which combinations are experimental, so you'll find that with experimental materials you need practice or you’ll maybe need to try and tweak a couple of settings on your printer, so that way you'll be able to get them to work together as well as they can.

So the most interesting of all these combinations I find is TPU95A, TPU95A is a type of plastic material which can stretch and return back to its shape much easier than other plastic materials is kind of like a rubber, so you can produce interesting components with that in combination with more firmer, stronger plastics, so by putting those two together you can make shock systems or other kind of interesting things.

So, the main advantage and the main reason why you would use dual extruder is so that way you can use better support materials and these support materials we'll get into right now. The two main support materials are PVA material, now PVA material is the polly vinyl alcohol, this material lets you dissolve the supports so once you've 3D printed your component and you've created the most dense, hardest to remove supports imaginable you'll be able to throw that guy into the water and give it a couple of hours it will dissolve off all those supports and you'll be left with a perfectly fine finished model.

You won’t always be able to do this, sometimes final component, the plastic will be something that dissolves in water so in that case you'll need to use breakaway material and this breakaway material is also superb material to use. You wouldn't normally use it as a final component piece because breakaway material is kind of frail kind of fragile but as a support material it is fantastic it won't leave very many artifacts when you pull it off your final model. Right over here is a nice picture of the Ultimaker 3D printing something using dual extruding, so the white stuff is the PVA material that's the stuff you can dissolve and the darker gray that is the stuff that you would have your final model be.

Dual extruding comes standard on the Ultimaker S5 and the Ultimaker S3 and the OD Ultimaker 3, 3D printers, so if you get one of those printers then you'll have the capacity to use dual extruding. So, one of the negatives of using dual extruders is that you need to use purge towers or have an ooze shield, so when you're 3D printing your component you'll either need to build a tower next to your component or you need to encase your component with basically a shield, you need to encase your component with a plastic covering. So this is because when the printer swaps between each particular filament there'll be a little bit of like ooze leaking out at the top of the nozzle and that little bit of ooze will mess up your final print, because without these things for the nozzle to rub against and remove that little bit of filament, that a little bit of stringy kind of spider webby filament then you'll end up with a model with that kind of filament all over it and becomes either a hassle to remove at the end or more likely it will end up stopping you from being able to print at all. I hope this has been enjoyable and fun and until I see you next time stay cosy guys!