Oh... interesting extruder

[CaptainObvious]

I was looking around Ebay for some electronic components and I stumbled upon this:

0.2mm Nozzle Extruder Print Head for 3D Printer Makerbot Mendel RepRap NTC 100K


I think it's a brilliant design, the hotend heatsink is combined with the extruder body and that makes it amazingly compact, I haven't seen anything like it before.
It would seem to have many advantages compared with a J-head or E3D hotend, of course it is much shorter which increases the maximum print height, also it should be more rigid and reduce "ringing" when printing at high speeds. Also the short filament tube should reduce friction when extruding and the heatsink can also cool down the stepper motor. Me likey!
The only issues I see with it is that it doesn't seem to have mounting holes and it may be difficult to access the extruder to clean it.

It got me thinking that it could be easy to build something like this from scratch, a L section piece of aluminium extrussion to mount the motor and a threaded hole at the base to screw in a shortened hotend barrel... or maybe I'll just order one to try it...

[f.larsen]

If you do give it a go of making a version of this, please post the progress. I'm interested.

0.2mm though seems like a recipe for clogging constantly.

Is this using a plunger design for keeping tension on the filament against the drive gear?

[ciutateivissa]

Captain Obvious,

since I have tested serveral different extruder here in my printer(s) I can tell you that building a hotend is much more difficult as it seems to be. That said I personally have experienced that most of the Chinese extruders or even hotends of quite poor quality. Basically they SHOULD work, but most of them are not build precise enough e.g. the tube to guide the filament is to short and does not fit properly into the nozzle... the hotend become clogged and in most cases you´ll be unable to clean it without demaging the tube again. Most of the "engineers" building cheap extruders doen´t even know about the different sections in a hotend having different temperatures aso.

In the hotend I currently using I´m able to print ABS at 242°C WITHOUT a fan or a metal heatsink - it is just well designed...

[paradiddle65]

Captain Obvious,

since I have tested serveral different extruder here in my printer(s) I can tell you that building a hotend is much more difficult as it seems to be. That said I personally have experienced that most of the Chinese extruders or even hotends of quite poor quality. Basically they SHOULD work, but most of them are not build precise enough e.g. the tube to guide the filament is to short and does not fit properly into the nozzle... the hotend become clogged and in most cases you´ll be unable to clean it without demaging the tube again. Most of the "engineers" building cheap extruders doen´t even know about the different sections in a hotend having different temperatures aso.

In the hotend I currently using I´m able to print ABS at 242°C WITHOUT a fan or a metal heatsink - it is just well designed...

Ciutateivissa,

What hotend are you currently using?

[ciutateivissa]

Ciutateivissa,

What hotend are you currently using?

I´m using the V2 hotend from RepRap.Fab http://reprap-fab.org/shop/product_i...products_id=90 and don´t have any issues after more than 200 prints with it, mainly in ABS. on top of that the benefit from using a hotend which need no fan is far less warping :-)