Looking for smallest diameter heater block.... Ideas?

Looking to make my effexor as small as possible. since the nozzle sits in the exact center of the Effexor, I need the nozzle that will fit on the smallest triangle with the nozzle located at the center.

Any Ideas????

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/21/2015 04:21PM by patrickrio.

Quote
patrickrio
Looking to make my effexor as small as possible. since the nozzle sits in the exact center of the Effexor, I need the nozzle that will fit on the smallest triangle with the nozzle located at the center.

Any Ideas????

Actually I think you need to have the bearing joint's as far apart as you can so going the smallest you can is not beneficial, IMHO the std Kossel spacing of 40 mm plus the ball offset is just about the minimum I would go with and in fact when I get my CNC Router finished I want to mill out an Aluminium Effector with the bearings at around 75-80mm centres to help counteract any effector tilt whilst moving across the bed.

Doug

it is a VERY small printer. the print area is 100mm diameter and the arms are likely to be only about 100mm long (with effective arm length 110mm with the balls on each end.) so even 20mm distance between the arm is a 20% ratio which is high I think.

I am also using the 3 ball effexor design, which lets the triangle be smaller.

long and short (short) is that a smaller diameter heat block will allow a slightly larger build area for the outside dimensions of the printer.

Do you have any small diameter suggestions?

You can build your own heater with Nichrome wire. Just calculate how many ohms you need and get the wire diameter and length to fit the melt zone. Water cooling will also give you a smaller footprint than fans.

This will be a PLA only printer, probably with rafts for larger items, so a bed heater should be unnecessary. I am also using a PEEK heatbreak with teflon liner, so cooling should be unnecessary too.

That said, I DO want to find a small diameter heat block to minimize effector size.

And it would be nice to know the minimum angle I should let the arms reach (15 degrees?) as well as the maximum angle (90 degrees?)..

And the ratio allowed for arm length and distance between arms would also be nice to know....

Wrap the nichrome wire around the nozzle and use the proper insulation for the minimum size hot end heater. It shouldn't be too hard to find examples on the web.

Even the standard heater blocks will be under the effector, so they won't affect the size of the effector. You only need to worry about what's above the effector like heat sink fans and probes.

20 degrees is considered to be the lowest angle to use and still maintain high accuracy and resolution. Accuracy and resolution also suffer when approaching 90 degrees.

PLA usually needs a print layer fan, so this may impact your maximum build size.

p.s. The arms on my printer are 360mm long and 60mm apart.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/21/2015 07:00PM by etfrench.

Someone must have tried using a stand alone air pump and tubes for cooling. I don't know is a blower fan can make enough pressure for a setup like that.

If the Effector stays flat, which it does, anything above or below the effector can cause the effector to be larger in width and potentially limit the print area next to the linear guides, depending on the design. Smaller width gives me a larger build area for a given frame size.

If I use the same ratio of arm length to distance as your machine, I can have an effector sized as an equalateral triangle with sides less than 20mm. This will be small enough that the heater block for a standard E3D nozzle will stick out from the edge of the effector.

Your idea of building my own smaller heater block is interesting, but i would prefer to find a cheap, small diameter one already built if possible. I have found the Pico:

pico nozzle

But it is rather expensive. It costs about as much as all the other parts of my printer combined.

Still not cheap but a step in the right direction; sub-miniature heater cartridge from Me3D.
And they got a 60W version, that I have been looking for.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/22/2015 02:51PM by SlowFoot.