The way to print in to colours is to make your model as two objects in your favourite cad package and then save these separately. Open one then the other in your printer s/w and then you can assign a print head to each object. When they print because they are so close together the fuse as one. Here is a simple example of this.

The yellow square is one object and the blue another.

Its my first two colour print 🙂

Not having much fun with this printer so far. After making the initial error of not realising that I the printer came with ABS and not rolls of PLA I had tried updating the firmware to a newer and custom version. Sailfish 7.7. Doing this made the printer behave oddly in that it didn’t know where the centre of the bed was and after doing and initialization procedure would either print in thin air or crash the print head into the side of the case.

Ok! I am sure I have trashed the firmware in some strange way and it set the 0 in the wrong place. No setting I tried made any difference so I looked at reverting back to the original but I couldn’t find one. I used this guys .bin file (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/wanhao-printer-3d/LyWhVQB6Uzg) and seemed to be making progress as it would now print in the right place. However it would only heat the heads and bed to preheat temps until I did factory reset and then it was all good in RepG. Makerware looked ok in the outset but it won’t heat the heads (it would heat the bed) so I guess it’s not sending the right flavour of gcodes. So I thought but being tired I didn’t realise that (or hadn’t relly noticed that) Makerware sets the bed temp and waits before turning on the heads.

So if you want to revert your printer back to a factory like state follow the instructions on the Wanhao page here. Below are the preference settings for the firmware if like me you did not take a note of them before you rushed ahead to improve your printer with Sailfish (its called Sailfish because its faster than a Marlin.)

http://firmware.makerbot.com/firmware.xml
http://jettyfirmware.yolasite.com/resources/beta/firmware.xml

Sailfish has loads of good settings so its probably worth it. Ans then you can print something. Yey!

Right so now I know I am working with ABS I can get the temperatures in the right region for printing. I am using 110 degs for the bed and 245 degs for the print heads.

I have also noticed that the print heads are not the same height so I can’t effectively level the bed. One head will always be a bit to high. I came across this thing on thingiverse. It also explains the reason for the spanners included with the printer.

So next problem is to print it out. More things to learn about. I gave it a go with MakerWare and by default it uses the right print head but like the picture above my right print head is a bit on the high side. You’d think you just choose the print head you want to use in the make-it dialog but of course not. Took me a while to figure out but you have to click on the object button on the left and then which head to use.

First print came out like this on the left.

Feed jammed maybe? Try again (right.) Ok so maybe not high enough feed rate. Easy to fix in Cura – just up the flow rate. Not in Makerware though. Came across a youtube vid describing another thing which incidentally mentioned changing a setting for ABS called feed rate multiplier. Coupled with my previous experiments with flow rate calibration I figured that this is the thing I needed to change. For ABS it needs to be 0.85 and PLA 0.97 for a base setting. You need to do some more calibrated feeds to get this exactly but it will do for now. And try again.

And we have a winner!

You can see here the problems you get with ABS and drafts. Its really hot in the office and the printer is by an open window. The near right edge shows warping caused by the draft. It’s ok on this print as it does not interfere with the surface I am going to use. There is also some delamination. Other than that it printed out quite fast and the mounting holes are reasonably round.