Your Own Tool Changer

• All the cool new 3D printers have tool-changing heads. Instead of multiplexing filament through one hot end, you simply park one hot end and pick up another. Or pick up …read more

All the cool new 3D printers have tool-changing heads. Instead of multiplexing filament through one hot end, you simply park one hot end and pick up another. Or pick up a different tool, depending on what you need. There are many advantages to a system like that, but one disadvantage: cost. [Ultimate Tool Changer] has been working on a design for what he calls a simple, cheap changer, and it appears to be working well, as you can see in the video below. This is one of those things that seems easy until you try to do it. He talks about a lot of the failures and dead ends along the way. We worry that the tolerances are tight enough that wear over time might affect some of the key components, but how long that might take or if it will happen at all, we can’t say. Regardless, the system does