Just curious if Cody noticed any issues with the Hyperfuse GMK stuff like what they're seeing on the TA buy...I have to think it was the custom color that created the problem but who knows....
One more good thing of not having it pre-sorted...can have some central QA..
I'm also curious of this... I saw one post on Reddit where someone mentioned seeing swirls and splotches on some of the keys. I know it's early but have we seen any manufacturing flaws so far?
none, i believe those are most likely caused by using custom colours, rather than tried and true gmk ones, certain pigments just react differently to others in the same conditions
What Bunny said, and when you consider the way that injection molding is done and how colors are achieved for molded parts the swirls and less prevalent uneven colored keys on TA make sense.
The raw material for injection molding is plastic pellets, which is a good thing to understand going into this problem. For GMK's base colors they probably have huge bins of pre-colored pellets that they buy in high volumes for their standard commercial customers. When you have to do a custom order color, and don't have enough volume for them to go out and buy a ton or so of pellets custom made by a plastics vendor in that exact color, they have to mix base pellets with a colorant. When time to mold, they mix all the pellets and the colorant in a hopper that mixes them as they feed into the injection molding machines, the mixing is done to maintain consistent distribution of pellets and colorant. So any sort of inconsistency along the line from non-mixed corners in a hopper, to static build up on feed hoses, or any other issue that can happen can lead to inconsistent distribution of base and colorant and lead to some of the issues people have brought up on TA. Luckily since hyperfuse used all stock colors, there is probably nothing to worry about here.
You forgot about the extruder, though. The screw in the extruder serves two functions - it heats the material through shear forces, and it
mixes the resin (like, really well). There are different sections to each screw, and different screw designs for different applications (this is critical). They may have a screw designed for one application and this custom color stuff may actually be causing issues (colorants can have a much larger effect than you would expect on the processability of various resins). But the flights (the "threads" of the screw) have very particular designs to force mixing, even having "multi-level" (for lack of a better term and my memory is failing me) flights where the resin will get lifted up to another section briefly before passing back. Screw design is a very interesting science.
Anyway, all that to say that the only
real time that mixing would be a problem is typically during transitions. If your resins are sticking in the screw or somewhere else you can have contamination issues. But a good purge of the old resin would solve that.
Keep in mind that my experience is in a slightly different field (flat die extrusion), so I am not an expert in injection molding - I just happen to know (a few) things about extruders. I'm more than happy to be proven wrong here.
I'm also not familiar with GMK's equipment.
Oh, and I'm not disagreeing with your conclusion that HF should avoid this issue - just adding to your explanation about TA.
