Mineral insulated heating elements have a core of Nichrome or similar resistance wire insulated with a ceramic consisting primarily of aluminium oxide or magnesium oxide and enclosed in a metal jacket. They are available in sizes down to 1mm in diameter. The outer jacket can be brazed or silver soldered to a hotend body - in the case of the hotend shown in the photo in the last post, this wouldby leadinglights - Tech-Talk
I am returning to this as I have noticed several articles on Boron Nitride thermal paste. I will try Slice Engineering Mosquito Boron Nitride Paste as soon as I have got my hands on some. Meanwhile, reporting back on a few brief trials with CPU Heatsink thermal compounds. Using my tiny 3W WW resistors and 0.05mm copper shim I did have my first ever burned out resistor when using no-name white comby leadinglights - General
The results I got earlier in this thread, along with a discussion with deckingman have made me look again at when can be done to make a lightweight hotend which can be used in a simplified heated Delta printer. Although this hotend is not working yet, this is only because I haven't yet made a heater element for it. I have little doubt that it will work well. There is an old trick to bending cby leadinglights - Tech-Talk
I have got the asymmetry down to 4 steps. This involved a complete strip-down of the gearbox, fettling of the gears to address a slightly high spot, re-greasing with extreme pressure grease instead of general purpose grease and, most importantly, the replacement of the stepper motor with a more powerful version. Nothing that I did should have cured the problem as things like an under-powered motoby leadinglights - General New Machines Topics
I have used pogo pins on test gear that experiences high levels of vibration and acceleration and don't think that will be a problem. Each pin has a built in spring and this will allow continuity to be maintained. There is one problem that I had not thought of mentioning though. There needs to be a mating contact for the pin to make contact with. I typically used a part of a PCB with a 20um golby leadinglights - General
I have not heard of or tried anything in the way of a quick change hotend of the sort you describe, but if I could offer a couple of thoughts: For electrical connections you could use Pogo pins example at has a 9 amp rating. Smaller ones are available for thermistors, fans etc.. A possible way of attaching the hotend to the carriage to allow a very quick change is to hold it on with a magnetby leadinglights - General
Are you asking for an auto-change hotend or one than can be quickly manually changed? Mikeby leadinglights - General
Now there is a thought: A coffee table sized sand table built into a coffee table. No more books of the Deserts of the World or the Cars of Enzo Ferrari to entertain visitors, they can just be hypnotized by ever-changing patterns in the sand. Mikeby leadinglights - CoreXY Machines
I had hoped to be able to get some early results of the new bed leveling/compensation method but have obviously annoyed the gods of technology - perhaps because I offered neither prayers nor sacrifice after everything I did had been going so well for a while. Early indications of this were when I tried to open the assembler in the latest Microchip MPLAB X IDE and found that it didn't exist. Theby leadinglights - General New Machines Topics
@boggen79. I think you are under the impression that water cooling has to remove a lot of heat energy from the cold end of the filament. The heat-break section of the filament feed tube is deliberately made as nonconductive as practical. This is commonly done by making it from a material with poor conductivity (stainless steel) and having a small cross-section. During normal filament feeding operby leadinglights - Developers
Quoteboggen79 automotive -> radiator hose, coolant hose. tractors small and large -> radiator hose, coolant hose, hydraulic hose, lawn mowers, small engines (2 cycle, 4 cycle engines such as chain saws and weed eaters / trimmers) = shops should have high end temperature hose. make sure you read up on "min bend radius" for hose. google "min bend radius hose" i want to say it is 3 or 5by leadinglights - General
There may be enough information on this forum and on Github and similar places for you to make your own flexible drive extruder. I am sorry to be negative but the whole field of hands-on 3D printer making is either going through a major trough of disillusionment or is actually dead. There are a few practitioners of the arcane arts of RepRap left, but they are typically people too old to have learby leadinglights - General
I am getting strange results setting up a motor driver for my printer head changing mechanism. I am using a LV8729 and am driving a NEMA11 which has an Imax 0f 0.67A. I understand from the data sheet and other sources that IOUT = ( Current setting reference voltage / 5 ) / 0.22Ω. For 0.5A the setting should be 0.55V but this won't even move the motors. Increasing the trimmer voltage to 0.91V theby leadinglights - Stepper Motors, Servo Motors, DC Motors
Silicone is very flexible and works up to about 230°C. Use the thick-walled variety often called "Vacuum Tubing". You can see examples of this in use in the following videos. (at about 15:45 ) and Mikeby leadinglights - General
QuoteMKSA Quoteleadinglights As far as I can see, your kinematic mount should work satisfactorily although you may find unwanted behavior with heating or cooling of the build stage.... Mike No, it doesn't. Hmmm, you may be right or you may be wrong. When I looked at the video from doublec4 I saw a Kelvin kinematic mount with tension springs to maintain a seating force. Within the constraintsby leadinglights - General
The 27mm diameter ones are 7BB-27-4LO while the 20mm ones are 7BB-20-6LO. The LO at the end signifies that they have leads attached. It is probably better NOT to try to solder on leads yourself as this needs a special low temperature alloy. Mikeby leadinglights - General
Piezo disks should give a useable output up to about 80°C although some "no-name" piezos have not been too good. Murata piezos are more reliable. A pdf on shows the effect of temperature (about page 7 I think), time and multiple probe strikes on a disk. Your mileage may vary, this development after all, and many boojums wait to jump on the unwary. Mikeby leadinglights - General
As far as I can see, your kinematic mount should work satisfactorily although you may find unwanted behavior with heating or cooling of the build stage. This is caused by slip-stick friction as the bed expands or contracts. On my printer, I used Maxwell type kinematic mounts and found the middle of the bed could rise and fall by up to 50 microns. Picture below of one of the three mounts with anby leadinglights - General
The next bit of work on this printer is to try out the water cooling in printing conditions. I have already established that quite a bit of heat that the cold-end will be required to remove comes from hot filament being moved into the cold-end during retractions ( ). As far as how much, checking this by manually extending and retracting filament gives a not very precise value of "quite a bit". Tby leadinglights - General New Machines Topics
Thanks, deckingman, it looks like I will be following you on YouTube from now on. I always find your progress inspiring and it is nice to see how well your printer is coming on - but also good to see that I am not the only entertainment that the gods of adversity have. A couple of thoughts from your video: I have started to move to Torx stainless steel screws as I am also getting too many roundeby leadinglights - Developers
Is there an existing configuration of Marlin which would support two thermocouples with Adafruit AD8595 conditioners? The output from these is 5mv/°C with a -1.25V offset. Mikeby leadinglights - Firmware - Marlin
I have done some preliminary tests by manually (software not set up yet) feeding PLA through the hotend, retracting the filament by 20mm then extending and feeding a couple of millimeters - repeating this approximately every 2 to 3 seconds for a minute. The temperature increase I read on the cold-end was about 0.7°C Without the filament it looks like the cold-end is extracting somewhere around 3by leadinglights - Tech-Talk
The first time I saw watercooling discussed on this forum the poster had soldered a straight bit of brass tubing at 90° to the stainless steel feed tube just above the heat break so that the cooling tube was touching at only one place. That user reported that it worked well. A more recent forum entry had somebody enclose the fins of an E3D V6 All-Metal hotend in a water jacket - a task that had tby leadinglights - Tech-Talk
@Mr_Huns, Thank you for your interest. The piezo sensor work is coming on well-ish insofar as it has not given me any unpleasant surprises. The sensor shown in that earlier photo can be seen installed on the Z carriage in I wish the rest of it was coming on as well as I seem to be fighting the twin demons of leaks and airlocks on the water cooling. I have just sidled silently away as it seems toby leadinglights - Tech-Talk
Piezos are inherently very sensitive and this means that they can pick up movement that is not what is being looked for. The most noticeable example of this is that the end of a X, Y or XY movement will result in shaking of the printer which can last for several hundred milliseconds - this movement will be picked up by the piezo and, if it is above the trip point, will result in a false signal. Tby leadinglights - General
The present stage of the project is to determine how good the water cooling is. When I first started this project I designed a water cooled cold-end and did some simple trials to assure myself that it was satisfactory. The notes having been lost I think that a bit more disciplined approach worthwhile. The diagram below shows one of my water cooled cold-ends. The aluminium body has bee ghosted tby leadinglights - General New Machines Topics
The last couple of days has been spent sorting out the wiring and making sure the documentation is up to date. The RAMPS 1.4 is getting a bit crowded in its housing and will be fitting homemade oversized heatsinks to get the heat from the motor drivers where the fans can cool them Something I didn't think of untill I thought "where are the Pololus?" Connection diagram to show what the RAMPS isby leadinglights - General New Machines Topics
Molex Microfit 3 are my goto for this They are rated at 10.5A so should be good for any normal hotend. JST make a 2.5mm in cable connector which is good for about 3A - still fine if you are using a 24V hotend Both of the above have shells that can be clipped into a bulkhead. Another option is the 10A connectors use by RC model aircraft to connect the battery to a brushless motor driver - these hby leadinglights - General
Biceps is beginning to emerge from nearly a year in the wilderness. This was partly because I came across a problem with the design of the underbed sensors which needed several months of head-scratching. Besides this though, there was at least a degree of concern that documenting my build may be shouting into the wilderness with my words only read by netcrawling bots or the occasional dyslexic Goby leadinglights - General New Machines Topics
I have received about 12 "comments" in the last few days all of which are essentially:- QuoteI want chat with a guy because I'm very lonely. Write me here please and I`ll give you my phone number.............................................. All of them are from the same poster, Sosatel3D. Although they are taken down as soon as I flag them, what I want to know is why they didn't remove the poby leadinglights - General