Hi all, I am as you probably know a retired guy my hobby is building different printers as cheaply as possible, making as many component's as possible from various materials, I have built a basic prusa I3 type which is my old faithful on which I make all the plastic parts, I have a metalwork lathe and lots of oddments of metal to use. My latest project is another prusa type this time with added extras i.e. bed levelling with an inductive probe and colour mixing with three extruders and bowdan tubes and a home made diamond type hotend. I have with help at times from this forum succeeded with the build and setting up the probe and third extruder on my Ramps 1.4. Mechanically everything is running perfectly X.Y.& Z axes and 3x Extruders and bed leveling . The mixing nozzle is my downfall I have sourced the machining details from an ebay advert for a diamond hotend and made one to match with heat breaks and aluminium cooling fins I designed and printed a cooling shell / printer mount with two 40mm reclaimed computer fans blowing across the cooling fins, My first problem was that the 40watt heater down the centre of the aluminium body did not heat the brass nozzle at the bottom before the thermister hit the temperature in the middle and cut the power hence plastic (ABS) did not come through so I made a close fitting heater for the bottom of the cone and connected it in parallel with the heater cartridge now I have heat at the nozzle but still no plastic, all that happens is melting plastic compacting and blocking all three drilling's. I designed a small test cube with the three colours stacked red bottom green middle and blue top as a test, on running the code everything works, homing, levelling, X Y Z and three extruders in turn resulting in the hobbed drives grinding holes in the fillament No plastic extruded only packed in the heated part. On reading this forum earlier I find a lot of people using brand name diamond hotends seem to have similar problems, can anybody offer suggestions that I might try or have I bitten off more than I can chew this time.
Regards Nigel
