We had a chat with Amolen, a maker of some very unusual 3D printer filaments.
What caught my eye was the unusual spool shown above. Normally, filament spools are a single colour, or they exhibit a gradient as the filament extrusion’s colour is changed during manufacturing.
But this spool had colours all over the place, no gradients. What’s going on? I asked them to explain.
They’ve produced one of the very few “three-colour PLA” filaments. There are three colours in this spool, but it’s not a gradual change. Instead, the three colours are present throughout the entire length of the filament.
How is this done? It turns out they have a very special manufacturing extrusion nozzle. This nozzle accepts three separate coloured feeds and mixes them in the single output filament. Amolen calls this “parallel extrusion”.
If you look very close at this filament, you will see three colours — one is around the back, so it’s a bit harder to see.
Printing with this material is very interesting because the nature of FFF extrusions means that you would see a different colour on the object’s surface depending on the angle of view.
A couple of years ago, we saw the introduction of two-way parallel extrusion filaments, which gained some popularity. However, Amolen has produced a three-way filament.
Amazingly, they say they are working on a four-way filament that should be coming out soon.
I can’t imagine what a print would look like with this material, but I’d like to try.
Via Amolen
