Yet Another Hot End

Been working for a while to come up with a decent home-made hot end. This one has been working well enough for me to put up

[www.thingiverse.com]

As I still hope to go to higher temps I wonder if there are any ceramic tubes that would be smooth like teflon

Mike

this is just s stupid thought maybe, but is there a way to use the ptfe bowden tube in a hot end.?

dissidence Wrote:
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> this is just s stupid thought maybe, but is there
> a way to use the ptfe bowden tube in a hot end.?


No it is not a stupid thought!
I have sucessfully made myself a small hot end for my Prusa i3 and guess whats in the middle of it? You guessed it, part of the bowden tube.
Have printed 3 complete kits for the i3 with it and so far so good. (ABS only).

Cheers
Jan

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[3dprinting4u.wordpress.com]

I could certainly remove the inner wall in the SS section and extend the bowden tube all the way to the tip. I used tubing from McMasterCarr (51805K72) for the bowden section which is rated to 260C which is the same as the liner (both teflon). The only concern is that it could put some more stress on the push fit connector. I think the liner section holds the extra back pressure from any PLA/ABS swelling at the tip...

I am not sure if I have tried this but removing as many transitions as possible is best so I think it is worth a try... it would also make manufacturing even easier

Mike

lol you guys are just making me wish i could afford a mini lathe.


i am open for donations..lol

but i did switch to one of the makerbot style extruders and it is working well for me, i just wish the barrel was longer.

You don't really need teflon or ceramic inserts. I'd say just make the hole a little bigger than the filament. It's a really cool design anyway.

mikefazz Wrote:
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> I could certainly remove the inner wall in the SS
> section and extend the bowden tube all the way to
> the tip.
>
> Mike


Ok, maybe I misunderstood. I am using part of the BT as a liner. The tube going from the extruder to the hotend is one part and another part of the tube is used as liner.
I thought the question was more as "can you use the tube as in the material tube, and not making a liner from ptfe", to save drilling ptfe and so forth. That way make the body to suit your ftfe tube (liner).
Sorry if I confused anyone with my previos post.

Regards
Jan

The only thing I'm missing is a 'finished' photo of your hotend, I only see it small on a machine, or as a render, but no closeup of the hotend without anything attached to it.

Also, I feel like making an 'all metal' hotend is the latest thing, PTFE is nice, but I really do think it's not that hard to create an all-metal hotend, if you have the right equipment that is.

I am currently investigating how to make a lightweight cooling installation for the hotend, am using various materials that I have salvaged from numerous computers and a fan that blows onto it. You can get nice aluminum cooling elements from things like video cards and cut them up and attach them to the barrel of a hotend and have a fan blowing on the pins of that aluminum cooling block. It's a bit shitty that those elements are all anodized in the worst colors imaginable, but apart from that.. These elements work pretty good. I also use them to cool down my stepper motors since they fit exactly on the square back of a stepper motor.

Hi all I added a few more pics to the thingiverse page so it is easier to see the finished hot end.

dissidence
Having a lathe is nice and while I would like to say making my own hot ends will save me the expense of buying them I would need to make a whole lot of them to offset the cost. I do hope to go to multi-extruding soon so 2-3 extruders per machine would start adding up. My guess is my hot ends are <$10 each for parts but do take lots of time so saving $30-40 each will eventually add up if time != $$. Having a lathe is just fun too

ohioplastics
My experience has been that friction plays a big role, from [reprap.org] under the 'Clogged Extruder' section it is important to not leave a lot of clearance. Too much room in there just gives the plastic somewhere to expand into and create issues.

IceMan
Yeah thought that may have been the what you meant, I already had some different teflon material so I used that instead of the bowden tube but I don't see a real difference other than transparency.

Ohmarinus
I added those pictures, definitely needed. I am personally going with water-cooling because for multi-extruding it is smaller and arguably lighter, and who doesn't want to say they have a water-cooled 3D printer I will eventually add some water-cooling 'things'.

if i ever do manage to get a metal lathe, i dont think my wife would see me for a month. and a whole bunch of things would most likely go missing.