Vase-Mode Color Tower with Spliced Filament

prusaprinters

<p>Rather than spending a bunch of time swapping filament to print out color swatches, I decided to use my <a href="https://www.printables.com/model/215865-Filament%20Splicing%20Jig">Filament Splicing Jig</a> to piece together all of my colors beforehand and then print the tower in one fell swoop. And to make it print fast, the elliptical cylinder prints in vase mode.</p><p><strong>Printing Settings</strong><br>The following figures are all for printing with a 0.2mm layer height and 0.6mm line width:</p><p>Each color section is 13mm tall and uses 200mm of 1.75mm filament. The overall tower height is 100mm, making room for 7 color segments plus a little slop at the bottom and top for the vagaries of extrusion feed rates, initial purging, etc.. If you want to make your tower taller with more color sections, you can simply scale it in the Z direction in your slicer and then add more 200mm length color sections.</p><p>Note that the first filament section should be about 50mm longer (250mm total) to account for the initial purging that happens when you load the filament and start a new print. Also note that the final filament section should be at least 500mm to account for the extra tower height and any other slop <i><strong>plus </strong></i>the length of any Bowden tube you might have. On my Prusa Mini+, I used about 1000mm for the last segment.</p><p>When you set your slicer to vase mode, set the number of bottom solid layers to zero. If you do want a solid bottom, you'll need to add more filament to the first color section. &nbsp;I set the perimeter printing speed to 45mm/s, so the whole 100mm tower printed in about 15 min.. Note that after printing, you can simply write some sort of filament ID on the back side of the tower, or else use little labels.</p><p><strong>Filament Splicing</strong><br>Here is a video on how to use my <a href="https://www.printables.com/model/215865-Filament%20Splicing%20Jig">Filament Splicing Jig</a> to piece together your filament sections. Make sure to clean up the joints with a sharp blade or file so they feed cleanly through your extruder.</p><figure class="media"><oembed url="https://youtu.be/UgFf3n4iQ6w"></oembed></figure>