Hi, I have an idea. 😃
I'm an anycubic idiot (bah, they can take custom firmware) and have only ever had their resin printers in the past. I'm new-ish to printing firearms and fdm in general. Got a kobra 3 v2 combo, which has a multicolor ACE (a la AMS) system.
I put a better hotend and a diamondback on it, and after I get it dialed in running in the 300+ range I want to make a 4 nylon orca.
Essentially I want to make much of the outside surface (stock, grip, anything which needs to accept impact) out of regular naked siraya ppa (they do have an actual ppa now) as unfilled nylon is allegedly less brittle, then print most of the internal structure out of their ppa-cf, print any components or surfaces which need to be very hard and heat tolerant out of Bambu's PPS-CF (near front of upper, inside handguard, anything near barrel or gas) and then print any surfaces which need to accept sliding wear (near bolt, charging handle, maybe buffer tube?) in iglide i190 (a self-lubricating nylon designed to behave like teflon).
Since all of these are nylons (and all but one of them are aromatic nylons), I think they should print together, adhere together, anneal together (powder salt technique?), and behave like a single piece. Except the iglide, I can cut down on waste since it doesn't really matter if one layer of something which is meant to be ppa actually contains a bunch of cf or pps or whatever. Tool changer would be nice, but I don't have one.
I also had the idea of after mostly annealing (in powder salt potentially to avoid sag as these filaments apparently like higher annealing temps), to dip it in some kind of resin (maybe a harder silicone resin for the sake of toughness?) under vaccum in an oven to fill all the pores and gaps etc.
Has anyone done something vaguely like this before? Am I stupid and do you have any advice? I'm a long way from trying it but it is my end goal. Will post about how my tests go at some point. The idea is to get something approaching the performance of aluminum by specializing. Also heard a lot of people online say, despite the menufacturer specs, filled nylons actually print very well with fans or without an enclosure, but I'll just put together a vented tent if reality turns out to be different.
