E3D All Metal Hotend for Ultimaker

[musti 0]

Added on thingiverse.

 

[fns720 0]

Added on thingiverse.

 

Based on your design I made a new mount which contains a thread for pneumatic fitting: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:147115

 

[musti 0]

Cool, this is for E3D not originally designed for bowden. In the other version the push-fit screws directly in the heatsink.

 

[fns720 0]

Cool, this is for E3D not originally designed for bowden. In the other version the push-fit screws directly in the heatsink.

 

Yes, I know, I just ordered the bowdenless version therefore I made the changed design.

 

[mgg942 0]

The trick seems to be printing it at around 280° - hot enough to get stellar layer adhesion despite using a cooling fan, and hot enough that the first layer of ABS bonds to the acrylic build platform and parts stick. It is important to get that first layer adequately smeared, however.

Honestly, it's hard getting the prints off of the bed at all... Still working on that part.

 

Nick,

Please update your ABS-without-heated-bed status. Sill going OK?

Still printing directly on the Acrylc?

No blue tape?

No Kapton tape?

Don't fancy trying to print directly onto my Acrylic plate as it's warped. I'm now printing PLA onto blue tape covered 6 mm thick glass clamped to the Acrylic plate. or with diluted PVA adhesive instead of blue tape.

Mike.

 

[chopmeister 0]

Could anybody using the E3D currently please share their PID settings?

 

[jumpmobile 0]

I use E3D and am currently using the standard PID-Settings UM-Marlin comes with...

P 22.2

I 1.06

D 114

C 1

 

[nick-foley 5]

Nick,

Please update your ABS-without-heated-bed status. Sill going OK?

Still printing directly on the Acrylc?

No blue tape?

No Kapton tape?

Don't fancy trying to print directly onto my Acrylic plate as it's warped. I'm now printing PLA onto blue tape covered 6 mm thick glass clamped to the Acrylic plate. or with diluted PVA adhesive instead of blue tape.

Mike.

I ended up switching back to PLA for the time being. ABS was working fine, and prints were actually cleaner because retraction works better with ABS on this hotend. Regardless, PLA is just a lot easier to print without a heated bed, so that's where I've stayed. Mostly using in Printbl Banana Yellow because its super low viscosity allows for very high throughputs when printing large things quickly.

 

[chopmeister 0]

Thanks jumpmobile! I'm asking because since I installed the E3D, I'm getting massive temp overshoots. Like more than 20 degrees. And the temperature is very unstable. I've reduced the max current to the heater by half, and it's a bit better, but still not good. And after dozens of PID tuning cycles, I can't get it to work reliably. I am using the UM's thermocouple, and it worked fine with the old nozzle and heater.

If anybody has any ideas, it would be much appreciated.

 

[gr5 2,173]

Read about pid controller on wikipedia. It explains how to tune yourself and how it all works.

If the temp is unstable you want to decrease P, and/or I or increase D. So increase D or decrease P or decrease I. Usually P is the culprit but it depends how slow these cycles are.

For a quick test, cut both P,I in half. Try that. If that isn't much better, try doubling D.

These values can be way way off (by a factor of 10) and it might still work pretty well. In fact D isn't really needed as much as the other values and can in theory be 0.

The latest version of Marlin and Cura 13.06 or so and newer have these really cool features which graph the contributions from P,I,D so you can see what is going on. But you can't use the Marlin that comes with Cura you need to get it from here:

http://marlinbuilder.robotfuzz.com/

And I don't know how to turn show this stuff in Cura. You might have to edit configuration.h and enable something. Not sure.

 

[nick-foley 5]

It may not be your PID settings at all.

Depending on your physical printhead setup, the problem may actually be from EM interference in your thermocouple wires. Unlike a thermistor, the thermocouple signal is extremely weak/sensitive prior to being processed by the thermocouple PCB. If your thermocouple wires (the unshielded yellow/red portion of them) are running near (closer than 10mm-ish) your fan wires at any point, you will see flicker in your temperature readings whenever the fan is on, due to induced current in the wires. On one of my Ultimakers (not with an E3D, but a custom printhead) , this was enough to cause the hotend to repeatedly fail, because it would rapidly flicker +/- 30°. Inevitably, extrusion would fail - usually starting around the 5th layer or so, when the fan got up to full speed, because the hotend would be too cool even though the firmware didn't know it. This was a frustrating problem to debug, and I only discovered this cause a few days ago.

Moving the fan wire a few cm away from the thermocouple wire until it passes through the thermocouple PCB solved the problem completely. I may also shield the full length of yellow/red portion of the thermocouple wires.

It does not seem that the heater wires are causing interference with the TC wires. It is likely the PWM signal going through the fan wires which was causing the problems.

 

[sanjay-e3d 3]

Hi guys,

I haven't been as active as I would like on these forums, but I am simply strapped for time. I do read everything that gets posted here, but it seems you guys are getting on really well. If you ever do have issues I am still here looking out for you guys!

Just thought I'd drop by and let you know about the status of E3D Kraken. I now have prototypes:

More images here:

http://imgur.com/a/8Qey0

And a video run down of the features and design here:

 

I would love to see someone get this running on an ultimaker - and I am willing to give out free parts to someone who can show that they have the electronics to drive at least 3 extruders, as well as the ability to design mounting solutions.

If you're interested do post here letting me know why you'd make a good tester.

 

[irongland 1]

Hi Sanjay

I have to say I was contemplating why we don't try water cooling our heads the other day! Admittedly I was thinking of using a premade water cooler for a computer processor, which would add a lot of extra bulk opposed to just milling out a path where the filament travels. I think it's awesome that you are trying this on a four head system!.

I wish you and E3D luck on developing it!

If I ever need another hot end Ill surely buy one from you guys due to this thread and all the helpful ultimaker brethren that helped develop nice hot end mounts.

 

[nick-foley 5]

Absolutely amazing design. Very exciting stuff. Would love to help get it going on an Ultimaker. I don't have any printers with 3 sets of extruder electronics... and while I would love to spend the time to get this going on one of my machines, realistically, I'm probably too busy for that.

 

Regardless, 1) I have now designed several hotend mounts/printheads for Ultimakers that I think are semi-decent, 2) I would love to put some mechanical design time into making a mount for this hotend on an Ultimaker, and 3) could likely do it fairly quickly. Maybe someone wants to collaborate (in the NYC area or remotely) and get this going? Someone who is crazy eager and has the time and the machine to do some exciting stuff with quad extrusion?!?!

 

[am001 0]

I've had water cooling running for about 3 months now, using a tiny aluminium block instead of the E3D heatsink, and it is superb. I printed a part this week that had 96 separate spikes on the top, so thousands and thousands of retractions over a 40 hour print, never missed a beat. It allows me to have fan inside the chamber, so I get a heated chamber at 60degrees uniform temperature, just from the heated bed at 90degrees, so I get near warp-less ABS prints, even huge ones.

It uses a bottle of water as a reservoir with some additive in for anti growth etc. and a £10 gear pump from eBay, through a small PC water-cooling radiator that I had.

The real key that makes it and the E3D work for me is the quality of the machining of the stainless threaded tube from the E3D. Thanks Sanjay!

If Kraken uses the same tubes it should be excellent.

Not sure how I'd do 3 extruders though. Most electronics I know of can support only 2.

Andrew

 

[nick-foley 5]

Beautiful setup. Is it a peristaltic pump or something else?

 

[am001 0]

Thank you.

Its a gear pump, like an oil pump in an engine, just two meshing gears and a 12VDC motor. It has the right blend of throughput and pressure to push through the small (3mm) bore tube. Search brushless self priming pump on ebay and you see a ton of them from China. They are not brushless though, its just a normal brushed DC motor, so I have no idea why they are all listed as that. Works OK though.

I started with a centrifugal pump from the PC cooling kit I had, and it couldn't push through the small bore tube, then I got a small diaphragm pump and it was really noisy and generated a pulsing flow such that the tubes were always twitching. This seems the perfect compromise.

If you do it, plumb the pump to suck not push through the ultimaker, that was any leaks entrain air, not leak out water.

 

[jumpmobile 0]

Cool! Is that the Kraken?

I have heard of it but never seen one. Looks quite intimidating ;-)

But isn't that head very heavy? How much does it weigh and how big is it?

Soooo excited about this.

On designing a mount for that monster:

Could you post the measurements of the block including position and diameter of the bowden- and water pipe connectors? By that way everyone here could give it a try.

Greetings

 

[musti 0]

am001 and others, could you please share what retraction speed, distance, and minimal layer time work for you with E3D for ABS?

I am seeing some "wrinkling" on parts of the print where there are small patches between which teh printer jumps and the print is thus extrusion intensive. My current experiments went through retraction speed/distance combinations 40/2, 20/2, 20/4.5, 30/4.5, 20/1 without any significant differences betwee them at print speed 60mm/s.

Ideas would be welcome.

 

[am001 0]

I use Kisslicer as it gives so much better control and better supports than anything else I have tried and has the 'wipe' feature, so some of the numbers might not directly translate to anything else.

265deg first layer, 245deg otherwise

0.8 seam hide

layer between 0.04 and 0.12 depending how long I'm prepared to wait and what detail/ overhangs the part has.

I have a 4mm ID bowden tube so as to allow thicker nylon filament, so I use a larger retract, 6.5mm at 100mm/s The firmware limits this to 40.

10mm wipe

flow tweak 1.11

sparse every 2 or 3 layers (pro feature, not needed but speeds things up)

for best quality, skin 40mm/s infil 90mm/s sparse infil 110mm/s. Will go up to 200mm/s but you get a lot of artifacts from belt jitter etc. at that speed.

15s minimum layer time, but I have never found this to be particularly useful.

Hope it helps.

Andrew

 

[nick-foley 5]

Just an FYI for anyone else using the E3D - after resenting it for months due to its ultra-cloggy performance with PLA, it may be finally redeeming itself with printing in Colorfabb XT. Retraction doesn't seem to be a problem, and unlike ABS, XT is pleasant to print without a heated bed.

 

[aviphysics 9]

So, how is the E3D head working out? What does it allow you to work with above and beyond the stock head?

 

[nick-foley 5]

You can print reallllly hot things. I've printed at 290° with no problems. You don't need that for ABS, but I guess it's useful for PC? Haven't tried PC. (High temp example: The thermistor fell out today while I was reassembling it, I didn't notice, and I heated it for 15ish minutes without any temperature control... it probably hit 400 degrees, with no ill effects.) It's lighter than the stock hotend by some small to medium amount. It's maybe, possibly, slightly easier to assemble than the stock hotend, though not by much. Particularly the thermistor is a tedious PITA (see above...).

Anyway, I would definitely not recommend it for printing in PLA - it just clogs too often when retraction is enabled, because of the incredible stickiness of hot PLA. It is great for ABS, and seems to be great for XT.

 

[mgg942 0]

Anyway, I would definitely not recommend it for printing in PLA - it just clogs too often when retraction is enabled, because of the incredible stickiness of hot PLA. It is great for ABS, and seems to be great for XT.

 

Really surprised by that comment Nick.

I'd recommend it for PLA though I should stress that I am using the original Ultimaker Aluminium block, heater and thermocouple. I have retraction permanently enabled.

I should also mention that, these days I only use DiamondAge PLA.

Perhaps this hinges on one's experience with the Ultimaker hot end (mine was the the one that was standard immediately before Ultimaker 2). For me that clogged every week or so and was a real pain to clean. The E3D clogs less often and is much easier to clean now that I have a long series 1/8" drill and can clean all the way through with it from above removing only the nozzle and the fitting for the Bowden tube.

At present I'm having a good run and haven't cleaned for several weeks while using the Ultimaker most days and some nights.

My impression which may be total rubbish is that the Filament may get abraded by the leading edge of the stainless steel sleeve. If I was assembling a new E3D now I'd pay special attention to that edge and also chamfer the top edge of the 3.2 mm through hole in the Aluminium body.

Mike.

I

 

[nick-foley 5]

I may have had more clogging than normal, but I still don't think there's much incentive to purchase this hotend if it PLA is your material of choice. It seems to work great for other materials - been printing heavily with XT for the past few days with zero problems. But if you're printing mostly in PLA, I think most of the benefits of this hotend are unnecessary.