I was thinking about heat exchange, as I frequently do, and I was wondering why we need electricity routed into a hot end. Can't we just move heat into a hot end through antifreeze? The whole heater block can be transplanted away form the hot end. We can route hot antifreeze through a heat exchanger, which would melt the plastic. The heater block can regulate the temperature of the antifreeze, which can be pumed into the heat exchanger on the printer hot end.

This is basically the opposite of a water cooled hot end. Instead of cooling the hot end from an external source, we can heat the hot end from an external source. Since the boiling point of antifreeze is about 200C, it may work well with PLA. All you'd need is some ptfe tubing to transport the hot stuff. In conjunction with a bowden drive, we can eliminate electricity from the rapidly moving print head. The benefit would be stopping electrical fires caused when wires come loose. Just an idea.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/14/2014 08:27PM by pbrstreetgang.

I bet more houses have burned down from electric coffee pots that have boiled their liquid contents off than have burned down due to hotend overheats. Given the fatigue in a hose over time from being moved, I recommend adding a dry shutoff to your heat source...and don't forget shields to prevent the operator from being sprayed with scalding hot liquid.

I seriously think that it would be a better use of time/effort to start a Kickstarter to manufacture a batch of small 300C thermal fuses to incorporate into a hotend as a safety cutoff.....

Heating a liquid, and moving it to another point to heat another object doesn't sound safer than the current setup. it sounds more complex with more points of failure.