ParCan hotend review
Posted by fragalot
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ParCan hotend review September 16, 2012 03:07AM |
Hey, Parcan kindly sent me one of his latest hotends to review, I'll try to he as honest and impartial as I can be, and try to compare it to some of the other hotends I have laying around.
I didn't really know where to put it, so I figured this would be a good excuse to join the forums after roaming around on IRC for a few months
Sadly, I won't be including any pictures as the SD card in my camera appears to have died on me and I can't recover the images well enough to be used here. I will do my best to describe everything textually.
The Package:
PEEK heatshield with PTFE tubing and brass nozzle pre-installed
brass heater block with resistor and thermistor pre-installed with fire cement
some high-temp wire
spare resistor
spare thermistor
spare ptfe tube
wire crimps to connect everything
hobbed bolt
The looks:
There are some minor visual defects, like some burrs that haven't been removed, but as these have absolutely no effect on print quality, i'm not complaining
Once mounted, this puppy looks great.
One thing that's really striking is just how short this new hotend is!
First thing that struck me was that the MK2 nolonger uses the 2 bolts & peek block to mount it to the extruder, instead the MK2 now uses a groovemount.
The print:
After making a groovemount plate out of PLA, I mounted the hotend to a wades and set to work calibrating.
Just how short the hotend was only came clear now, as I had to move the Z endstop down by nearly 20mm!
Starting to heat up the nozzle so I can measure the free extrusion diameter, I noticed that it was incredibly fast to heat up, at 12V it only took around 20 seconds to reach 185°C.. or so I thought.
Nomatter which thermistor I chose in marlin, the temperature would always be off by nearly 60°C !
I still need to contact Parcan about this, i'm sure it's just me doing something wrong here
By means of trial and error, I figured out that setting it at 248°C in pronterface gave me the perfect temperature for printing at 60mm/s.
The free extrusion diameter seemed a little lower than I was expecting and measured in at 0.42mm.
While extruding to measure this, I noticed 2 things.
The hole wasn't quite drilled in the center
there is absolutely NO turbulence
What I mean by this is, the filament came out straight, hit the bed, and still didn't curl up like it does with my other hotends.
GREAT!
And then my PLA groovemount melted.
So I just printed a new one out of ABS and set to work again, this time, I added a small fan to the carriage to cool the PEEK.. now the cold end doesn't even reach 30°C anymore, so a even PLA groovemount should work fine too, aslong as you've got a fan on it.
Getting the correct first layer height was a bit tricky, but it quickly became clear that this is a very forgiving hotend and will flatten out any imperfections from the previous layer with ease due to it's nozzle shape.
Bridging seemed to go really well, and printing 5cm long bridges have proven to be a walk in the park for this thing.
Something that struck me with this hotend compared to my J-head though, is that after a print, it seems to “drain” completely, so you need to purge around 1cm of filament before you start the next print. Despite this, it still prints without any stringing at all when using .9mm retract, so this is just something to remember when starting a new print. I solved this by purging the hotend in the gcode header of slic3r by moving up 5mm, purging 10mm of filament, and then wiping the hotend on the bed next to the goop pile before starting the print.
Though this might just be the crappy chinese PLA doing this.. it seems to vary quite a bit in melt temperature as the filament gets used too..
All in all, I think i'd recommend this hotend if you're looking at something short and affordable for your printer.
The hobbed bolt he sent me looked alright, had the right dimensions, but I haven't had the time to install this into the wades to see if it works.. but I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't.
I didn't really know where to put it, so I figured this would be a good excuse to join the forums after roaming around on IRC for a few months
Sadly, I won't be including any pictures as the SD card in my camera appears to have died on me and I can't recover the images well enough to be used here. I will do my best to describe everything textually.
The Package:
PEEK heatshield with PTFE tubing and brass nozzle pre-installed
brass heater block with resistor and thermistor pre-installed with fire cement
some high-temp wire
spare resistor
spare thermistor
spare ptfe tube
wire crimps to connect everything
hobbed bolt
The looks:
There are some minor visual defects, like some burrs that haven't been removed, but as these have absolutely no effect on print quality, i'm not complaining
Once mounted, this puppy looks great.
One thing that's really striking is just how short this new hotend is!
First thing that struck me was that the MK2 nolonger uses the 2 bolts & peek block to mount it to the extruder, instead the MK2 now uses a groovemount.
The print:
After making a groovemount plate out of PLA, I mounted the hotend to a wades and set to work calibrating.
Just how short the hotend was only came clear now, as I had to move the Z endstop down by nearly 20mm!
Starting to heat up the nozzle so I can measure the free extrusion diameter, I noticed that it was incredibly fast to heat up, at 12V it only took around 20 seconds to reach 185°C.. or so I thought.
Nomatter which thermistor I chose in marlin, the temperature would always be off by nearly 60°C !
I still need to contact Parcan about this, i'm sure it's just me doing something wrong here
By means of trial and error, I figured out that setting it at 248°C in pronterface gave me the perfect temperature for printing at 60mm/s.
The free extrusion diameter seemed a little lower than I was expecting and measured in at 0.42mm.
While extruding to measure this, I noticed 2 things.
The hole wasn't quite drilled in the center
there is absolutely NO turbulence
What I mean by this is, the filament came out straight, hit the bed, and still didn't curl up like it does with my other hotends.
GREAT!
And then my PLA groovemount melted.
So I just printed a new one out of ABS and set to work again, this time, I added a small fan to the carriage to cool the PEEK.. now the cold end doesn't even reach 30°C anymore, so a even PLA groovemount should work fine too, aslong as you've got a fan on it.
Getting the correct first layer height was a bit tricky, but it quickly became clear that this is a very forgiving hotend and will flatten out any imperfections from the previous layer with ease due to it's nozzle shape.
Bridging seemed to go really well, and printing 5cm long bridges have proven to be a walk in the park for this thing.
Something that struck me with this hotend compared to my J-head though, is that after a print, it seems to “drain” completely, so you need to purge around 1cm of filament before you start the next print. Despite this, it still prints without any stringing at all when using .9mm retract, so this is just something to remember when starting a new print. I solved this by purging the hotend in the gcode header of slic3r by moving up 5mm, purging 10mm of filament, and then wiping the hotend on the bed next to the goop pile before starting the print.
Though this might just be the crappy chinese PLA doing this.. it seems to vary quite a bit in melt temperature as the filament gets used too..
All in all, I think i'd recommend this hotend if you're looking at something short and affordable for your printer.
The hobbed bolt he sent me looked alright, had the right dimensions, but I haven't had the time to install this into the wades to see if it works.. but I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't.
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