Load/unload materials

Composer A4 uses three spool: two of them are common 3D printing filament plastics, and the third one is Anisoprint Fiber.

To load or unload a material you need to press Maintenance > Materials and choose a material spool you want to operate with. Choose load or unload an follow the automatic procedure instructions.

For every material, an extruder must be heated before operation. You can preheat the extruders to speedup the proccess.

The load/unload procedure is split into three steps: on the first step a feeder captures filament and you confirm it through the menu. On the second, stepper motor works at high rate, pushing material to extruder. On the third step, filament is gently transferred to hotend on a lower speed, and you need to confirm the material comes out of the nozzle.

For composite fiber there is a 4th step – you need to remove the cut fiber out of the nozzle using tweezers.

In some cases you might want to just move a material in/out of an extruder. In this case use Movement option as described here.

Another trick is a manual unload of plastic filament. When extruder is heated enough to release the filament inside, just release the clamp of the feeder and pull the filament out.