Saturday 13 February 2016

End of the hot-end

After last weekend's failed print I ordered some blue tape, but in the meanwhile (it's been four days, and it's still not here. FTW, Trijexx?) I happened to poke at the bed, and it turned out the corner that the print head starts in was loose. Now I should recalibrate, just to be sure. And since the backpressure was high enough that no filament got pulled for a while, check for stripping.

But first, clean. Atom. Clean. Atomic. Clean... I'm coming to the conclusion that indeed this hotend is also pretty crappy quality. Here's what it produces when I press filament through:


Very uneven. And the atomics are black and dirty. I admit defeat, and now need to find a quality hot-end for a Wade's Extruder on a Mendel90. It would appear my current hotend is a J-Head Mk II. RepRapSource has Mk V's available, but I'm not sure the shorter length is a good thing given the fan shroud. On the other hand, they look pre-glued, which is good, as gluing was a pain. Not sure if e3d or hexagon are compatible with my (2013) Wade's while being not much shorter than 71.5mm. More research is needed.

2 comments:

  1. E3D should be mostly compatible with a J-Head mount (both Lite and regular are decent). Hexagon is probably too short (I've mostly seen the Lulzbot edition, which is even shorter)? I run E3D Lite on several printers, and they are consistently better than the one J-Head I have tried (MK IV?). The E3D clones are hit and miss, but if you find someone selling a v6 clone (with the clamping screw in the heater block for the cartridge, rather than a setscrew) they're probably ok.

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  2. It doesn't look like the E3D v6 would fit well with the shroud - the fan (which might be optional) definitely won't fit, and it's only 62mm long, so would disappear into the shroud. Googling "mendel90 e3d v6" bring up a lot of pages on how to adapt the shroud. AFAICT, the v5 isn't much longer. I'd need to drop the fan duct for now and maybe sometime print a new one like http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1113928 or http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:491316 or http://hydraraptor.blogspot.de/2016/01/a-bridge-too-far.html (https://github.com/nophead/Mendel90/tree/master/sturdy_E3D/stls). If I'm going that route, I might as well get the newest and bestest.

    Oooh, look, e3d has a "lite" version for really cheap that does what I need - but only in 1.75mm. Not sure that I trust thin filament to work without buckling in a 3mm Wade's. Is it just me, or is the market moving towards 1.75mm as the standard? I guess the faster melting rate solves a bunch of problems.

    The Volcano actually looks intriguing. My list of things to print doesn't include much fine detail work, but rather calls for larger, faster, sturdier printing. I was thinking of spending up to 100 Euros for a high-quality hotend, the E3D Volcano Power Pack (http://e3d-online.com/Volcano/V6-VOLCANO-POWER-3MM-DIRECT-12V) looks like a lot of hotend goodness for the price.

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