Noztek have developed a new Filament Adapter for Winder 2, for use with transparent materials.
We’ve been making filament winding machines for 5 years. Beginning with the Winder 1, and more recently, the Winder 2 – both pictured below. And for those 5 years, we’ve advised that you will not have success with transperant filament. This is because we use Keyence laser technology to track the filament and guide it neatly onto the spool. The nature of lasers determines that they cannot of course detect anything that is not opaque, hence the incompatibility.
Left: Winder 1, Right: Winder 2
Our team are constantly revisiting our design prosesses, and reconsidering limitations and assumptions that have agency in our products development. Instead of re-inventing the spool, we often find that a small change is all that’s needed to make a big difference.
Such as with this issue of restricting what filament you can use in our winders. In this instance, it was in fact one of our customers in Germany, who pointed out that the filament need only be opaque at the lasor area. It’s only this area of the whole length of filament that the incompatibility lies. And so by masking it the filament at this point with a short sleeve of opaque material, it can be detected perfectly well. See our resulting bespoke designed sleeve below.
So if youre using one of our winders and want to start using clear filament, or you’ve not purchased a winder for this very reason – follow the link below!
Click here to Download your free Filament Adapter for Winder 2
Many many thanks to Henrik in Germany, a valued Full System customer, for helping us with this fantastic solution.
The adapter is currently only available for the Winder 2, Winder 1 version is coming soon!).