Filament switch: close up shots that highlights further the complexity of extruding plastics

I stumbled upon this old picture while looking for another one. It shows tiny carbon fibers embedded in crystal-clear polycarbonate, that happened when I switched from CFPLA to a crystal-clear polycarbonate (hellish stuff to print btw). Looking at it a second time makes me realize how complex extrusion is (more after the break).

A microphotography that shows carbon fibers during a transition from CFPLA to polycarbonate.

Cooling 3D prints with an aquarium pump

3D printing cooled with an aquarium pump!
It works well and it cannot be quieter. The pump is bulky,
but the overall is a very compact hot end.
(the above was a preliminary experiment)

Interestingly, while this trick is not new, very few people seem to use it. For years I had an air pump on a shelf for this purpose. Only recently did I use it, and I really like it better than fan on the hot end.

The good thing is that aquarium pumps do build some pressure in order to pump air down into water. No regular radial or axial fan can do this, they only move air around. Do not get me wrong: regular fans works well, but the smaller the fan the noisier and the shorter its lifespan. And they are bulky anyhow and obstruct the view.

Actually, I printed almost years without fans attached to the hot end at all. Instead, I used a large, powerful and silent 120mm PC fan on the printer chassis. It blows a lot of air on the whole part, which is often even better, but it fails to cool down tiny towers or islands when the hot end never move aside (flowing air is very lazy and will not reach tortuous parts). Also, the big fan blows air only from one direction, which shows up on opposite sides.

So I still needed air again on the head....

Home made filament drying box

How to make a simple dehydrator (drying box) with a solar vacuum tube

A short and probably overkill post for a passive and zero carbon footprint drying box (not counting the required one to make the tube).

I use a spare, high tech and powerful vacuum solar tube, but it is easy to make something with a copper or steel tube painted in black, around which you slide larger transparent plastic bottles. Such insulation is required to avoid the ambient air temperature from cooling your own heated air.

The second required item is a brand used low-tech cardboard box.

E3D v6 hot end: ideas and assembly tricks

Assembled E3D v6 with a few particularities

You may remember that I wrote broadly about hot ends in an another post, but this short new one is specifically about the sixth revision of the E3D family (E3Dv6).

This is probably the best hot end on the market right now (in my opinion -- and I did not check them all). It is not cheap, hence expensive as all the good quality hot ends. But this is a critical part where you cannot really lose money if you value your time...

However there are still some room for some improvements. 

Thoughts and hints around hot ends

This post finally documents ideas and hints I had during the design of two hot ends I made last year.

My extremely small "cheesy hot end" (all-metal and actively-cooled), here with an Ultimaker printed support.
This hot end was very easy to make (only used basic tools) and also because the barrel is quite short.

At the time I already had ordered an E3D hot end, but the lead time was so big that I decided to give it try myself. Actually, since I attached it with this tiny E3D support on my Ultimaker, I almost never swapped my hot ends anymore because it is just so reliable... The only drawback is that the efficient heatsink could be made almost half the size for more Z space, less vibrations and less weight (hence my smaller, low cost --and low quality-- copycat by the way, see below). And it does not mean I stop thinking ;)

Shades of brown with wood filament, via varying temperature

Wood filament : changing temperature to get shades of brown, or tree-ring effects

Wood filament, temperatures from 205 to 240°, home made Skeinforge plugin

You probably want to check my first post about wood filament if you did not already.

This sequel shows how varying temperatures impacts the color of the filament (as advertised).

How to clean the hotend and nozzle from the outside

How to remove clogged/molten filament in a V2 head?

Obviously you can disassemble the end, which is quite painful. It may also damage some items and threads in the long term.

Or you try whatever comes under you hand to remove the damn molten stuff in and around the PEEK. Of course, start by removing your bowden tube from the top quick coupling.

Homemade heated bed

Why add a heated bed ?

After I made mine, I never had an object pop off by itself because of cooling retraction. Way less issues also when a small plastic blob gets hit by the head while it prints the next layer (which occurs almost all the time with tall and thin structures).

Now there is an update: in this post I explain about how I print reliably, and it works probably even with Nylon and a cold bed!

For the heated bed, I used a single power supply setup, that I attached on the underside of the printer. I now have only the mains and USB cable getting out of the printer, and I carry no more bulky external power supply (that I sometimes forgot to bring with me!). It also reduces the failures due to the tired stock power plug when someone bends over the printer...

Heat sink on the stepper motors

Clean passive cooling on a stepper motor

Cool down your steppers : active or passing ?

For some time I was developing a new filament feeder, made out of PLA plastic, and finally, after a long print, I stumbled upon a feared issue : the motor gets hotter with work, and since it was over-extruding it got hot to the point it started to melt the pla around its screw mounts...

Isolate the hot end with Kapton and fight plastic leaks

Simply use kapton on your hot end !

My head came pre-assembled but it had a small leak between the Peek isolation and the aluminium heating block, that appeared at high temperatures. This resulted in oxydized PLA liquid (the brown juice that becomes crusty when cold), and it dropped on my prints, leaving a dirty dark trace in the object.

I first wrapped the peek and heating element with aIn any case I see no reason to do otherwise now. paper towel. But I had to change it often, and it becomes so dry that I was fearing it could start burning with the smallest trigger. But the leak finally reduced on its own.