Garcads WATER-COOLED hotend produces high quality ABS prints!

What started as just a idea between two friends has been brought to life and is printing better then any other hotend on the market right now, and we have proof:
Youtube videos:
Printer is a oldie but goodie, reprap prusa-mendel that I have done some custom improvements on, enjoy the videos and more to come!
Garcads water cooled hotend <--First test prints
Garcads water cooled hotend fully calibrated_high quality <---Dialed in overhang/bridging
Garcads water-cooled hotend_pt1layer height .1 layer height, fully dialed in and perfection at its finest.

This hotend is also capable of printing PC with the same high quality results, video coming shortly.


We love feedback/questions so feel free to post any, thanks for watching and more to come very soon!


Moderator edit : thread closed, see last message for details.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/24/2014 05:17AM by DeuxVis.

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is printing better then any other hotend on the market right now,

lol

If you have to use that much z hop to get good prints, you are doing it wrong.

bold claim....

how you cool your thermal barrier does not particularly improve print quality, it just keeps heat from transferring up the barrier and causing filament jams and exturder skips.

My PEEK thermal barrier prints the exact same quality with and without a cooling fan, just may be more likely to jam without the fan on longer prints.

Personally I can say I top the print quality of anyone in my 3d printer group, and that's with a hand made Wildseyed hot end.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/05/2014 07:29PM by Dirty Steve.

my Aircooled e3d provides a much better quality...

I think to demonstrate such a bold claim, you need to have higher res photo/video, because the print doesn't look great from that...

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if by high quality you mean that it doesnt jam, then yes you are succesful, however i think that the little square column on the last print probably came out really melty. and also you shouldnt need watercooling ust to run abs, its mostly for pla plastic which is a bit more tricky to print.

i think you are just complicating what already works, air cooled

Im sorry but air cooling will never be as good as liquid cooled....i dont see very many air cooled vehicles these days...lol..? I stand by my claim 100%.

It has nothing to do with how cold you make the barrier, you could liquid nitrogen cool the barrier and it wouldn't make a difference.

The barrier doesn't need to be cooled much more than 10c below the transition temperature of what ever filament being used.

The barrier has no effect on the filament coming out the nozzle other than heat creep and skipping.

There are many people in this forum who have been at this for quite awhile.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/05/2014 09:58PM by Dirty Steve.

Could you post up some high res pics of the prints?

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papabur
Im sorry but air cooling will never be as good as liquid cooled....i dont see very many air cooled vehicles these days...lol..? I stand by my claim 100%.

strictly speaking every vehicle is actually air cooled, most cars infact have a nice big radiator cooled by the incoming air as the car goes forward and by a fan mounted to it, circulating coolant merely serves as a transfer medium to get the waste heat energy from point "A" to point "B"

liquid cooling is where you are simply taking the waste heat energy from point "A" and dissipating it into a large body of water relative to the heatsource, some of the pc water cooling setups work this way and the body of water dissipates the waste heat as fast as it gets heated in the first place

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ive had both water cooled and air cooled, the air cooled works fine if you are not using a heated build chamber. however as soon as you heat the build chamber the water cooling comes in handy, because you can control the temperature of the transition zone separate from the build chamber. also running the water cooler allows you to cool the transition below the temperature of the environment.

I run 5 day ABS prints with a build chamber without any problems with air cooling. 25mm fan directed across my PEEK barrier.

It sounds like maybe you had a few very bad air cooled hotends in the past so you think this is the best when in fact I would say that many if not all of the best prints come from air cooled hotends. And just has already been stated it makes no difference if it's air or water cooled but rather how the hotend is designed.

I get very good prints use a Budaschnozzle, as good or better than what I can see in your videos. And admittedly there are a lot of people getting better prints than mine using air cooled.


If a guy has only eaten bologna for his life and someone gives him a cheapo steak he will proclaim it's the best thing ever while others sit by eating Filet Mignon and laugh at him. Not trying to make fun but just an analogy.

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Dirty Steve
I run 5 day ABS prints with a build chamber without any problems with air cooling. 25mm fan directed across my PEEK barrier.

im not sure what the specs of your printer are but when im doing a 12x12x12" print I need to run the chamber above 80c, but whatever works for you. all i can say is that the watercooling works and it works flawlessly.

I can't tell from the low resolution out of focus video, but I think my prints are better. I just started not to long ago. With each day I learn more. Using a prusa i3 with a magma. But I can see the need for liquid cooling in a heated build space.

I'm at about 60c for ABS on my chamber with successful 9 inch prints no cracks or separations. Max Z on my set up.

nice, i have nothing against air cooled hot ends, i just prefer water cooling, because I feel i can control the hot end better with it. also i believe some of the proponents to water cooling say it lighter than air cooling, I have a hard time believing that for one hot end, but when you have 4 hot ends then yes it can be quite a bit lighter, if each hot end has its own fan and heatsink. according to sanjaym the kraken, a 4 headed water cooled hot end, will weigh only as much as two e3d v5 hot ends. so yeah if you have a 4 head setup it weighs less.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/06/2014 01:28AM by aduy.

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papabur
Im sorry but air cooling will never be as good as liquid cooled....i dont see very many air cooled vehicles these days...lol..? I stand by my claim 100%.

I don't see many vehicles cooled with liquid nitrogen either, which would be far superior to water.

I think you might be trolling us...

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The reason for using water instead of air for cooling is the higher heat carrying capacity(Thermal Conductivity) and the Specific Heat Capacity of water compared to air that can be utilized at a very small section where you want to remove the heat. Heatpipe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe) will be better but not so easy to implement.

[koolance.com]

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Xabbax
The reason for using water instead of air for cooling is the higher heat carrying capacity(Thermal Conductivity) and the Specific Heat Capacity of water compared to air that can be utilized at a very small section where you want to remove the heat. Heatpipe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe) will be better but not so easy to implement.

[koolance.com]

Sure, we all understand the physics. But if you can already remove enough heat with air cooling, then removing more heat won't make a bit of difference to the printing. There is no magic to water cooling.

In engineering you do enough to achieve the desired result, doing more is just a waste of money. Otherwise, why isn't everything water cooled ? Nothing in my house is liquid cooled, apart from the fridge, which has particular cooling requirements

Anyway, first we need to establish if it does improve performance, which is not yet demonstrated.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/06/2014 03:11AM by bobc.

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It is just a little bit easier to implement water cooling on a delta printer than aircooling especially if you go dual or more extruders.

What fun,

What I can never understand is all the focus on cooling.
It's easy to adequately cool the cold end bit of a hotend. That's obvious by the small size and surface area of the heatsink.

There's not much heat to take away, it's not like a car, where there's loads of heat to dissipate. A radiator on a car isn't solid, it looks like it is because it's made up of many many layers of foil, to give it a massive surface area, it's a massive (and I mean MASSIVE) heatsink.

As for our hotends, I've seen bigger heatsinks on a FET.

Wouldn't working on making the hot bit of the hot end smaller, I.E, thermal transfer INTO the melt chamber be the important bit to improve prints?
Imagine a head with a tiny melt chamber, that'll give no back pressure, that'll equal no ooze and very precise control.

I think until there's a paradigm shift and someone uses piezo heating or laser or something, so there's a tiny melt chamber, it's not going to improve any more than it is.
Imagine if you just melt what you need and deposit it, bit like an inkjet.
*That's* when these will become consumer products, the tech for the rest is good enough, it's the hotend that is the constraint.


PS. With reference to cars being air cooled/water cooled, I've installed a 120v 1kW heater cartidge, that'll improve my prints as well won't it ? won't it ? I mean, when was the last time you saw a 40W kettle.

The main problem is to remove the heat in the stainless tube 2 mm from the heater block - not a lot of heat in the tube itself to remove. You only need about 2 mm exposure of the tube to some heatsink to remove the heat from the tube but the problem is to find a suitable way to do it so close to the heat source.

Agreed, and you can adequately do that with a heatsink and block at that point or via watercooling, or via a bit of dry ice or with liquid nitrogen, but they all do it adequately.
It doesn't really matter as long as its below the melting temperature of the filament being used.

(actually, it does matter if you think about it, because the hot bit has to be hot, so you don't want to overly cool the filament itself so that it arrives at the hot bit at -180, making the job of the hot bit harder)

I think we all understand how a hot end works, so cannot see how watercooling could improve prints.

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Xabbax
It is just a little bit easier to implement water cooling on a delta printer than aircooling especially if you go dual or more extruders.

I don't see in what world that it is easier to put water cooling on a delta rather than stuff a fan on the end....not to mention all the weight the hotend is now carrying and the impact the hose will have on motion unless you use something with like 2mm ID for supply and return.

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DaveS
(actually, it does matter if you think about it, because the hot bit has to be hot, so you don't want to overly cool the filament itself so that it arrives at the hot bit at -180, making the job of the hot bit harder)

ah see youve discovered something that water cooling can do that air cooling simply cannot. with water cooling you can actually control the temperature of the filament before it goes into the melt chamber, if you add say a few ice cubes to your resevoir you can actually cool the filament down before it goes into the melt chamber making it melt slower and reducing ooze. if you heat up your water you can actually transfer heat into the filament and make it flow more easily. now say you wanted to precisely control your resevoir temperature, what you do is add an inline pelt unit, which will allow you to heat and cool the resevoir. water cooling adds another element of control over the filament, the temperature it is before you melt it.

Brilliant, so you've implemented a way of controlling the exact amount of cooling on the cold bit of the hotend ?, why didn't you mention that earlier ?

That's fantastic.

So, are you must be using an extra thermistor on the cold bit of the hot end, so that you can measure it I presume? I also presume you are just adding ice as a proof of concept at this stage, otherwise it'd be pointless as it'd be so uncontrollable.

You really should mention such large steps, we'd all be interested, maybe we could help you develop them further. What firmware changes did you make, and how much improved are the prints ?
If it's due to this, why didn't you say ?!

Any chance of some high res photos ?, I'm sure everyone would love to see some.

Well done !

any pics of the actual hotend btw ? You've not even posted any pics of the hotend.

Hmm, another advantage is that if the hotend catches fire it can be automatically extinguished.

Also, you could wash the filament in the warm water before it goes in the hotend, make sure it's nice and clean.

I guess there are several advantages I overlooked

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