Got my new E3D All-Metal Hotend V4 - (Updated with Mounted Pics) (Page 2 of 9)

Heres a print I finished at 0.1mm 2 shells with the E3D & ABS. Need to fractionally tweak the flow a tad still I think. Plus this particularly ABS seems to be a tiny bit damp.. I'm getting extrusion bubbles tonight:

And a calibration print. 0.1mm, 1 shell.

And same again, but 0.05mm:

2n2r5
Water cooled and multi-nozzle versions are going to be out rapidly. I have the handmade prototype on my desk right now. I am in the process of getting drawings to CNC manufactures for a run of prototypes. 6-8 weeks till market I reckon. We fully intend on selling as a complete package including pump/hose/etc but you are welcome to recycle your existing stuff!

StaffordKnot
Fire cement from good old B&Q works great, you can buy a little 500g pot of it. But really no need unless you are doing something really demanding. Just securing the thermistor properly with Kapton tape works great for almost all cases.

Adrian
You are correct in everything you say, but one key missing fact is that the thermistor itself is not rated beyond 300C - this goes for all thermistors, not just the one we supply. That said we have gone much higher without problems - I have killed a thermistor only once, in the 400C range. The thermistor is placed to make the readings as close as possible to the filament inside the nozzle while keeping it away from the heater cartridge so you can get stable PID controlled temperatures. You should be able to use "normal" uncompensated temps for processing your ABS/PLA.

Nice prints too!

nlancaster
The solidoodle runs a Sanguinololu to drive it's heater as far as i can see - so no mods needed, just connect up to the heater outputs and go.

I did miss it mate, sorry! As Sanjay said, the Sang is fine to run the cartridge in and unto itself... The cartridge is about 3.6Ohm and will draw around 3.33Amps at 100% duty cycle.. however in practice mine is only ever running at 100% duty during the first 2 minutes of heatup and thereafter hovers at about 50% duty..

The current 4.8Ohm power resistors are running at 2.5Amps anyway, so its only .8 amps more... So the only issue I would consider is the standard PSU for the Solidoodle; depending on what heat bed you have and how many extra fans you are running, it may or may not be an issue. I don't like running PSU's too close to their rated power anyway, so have an upgraded 40Amp PSU so it only has to run at 50% load instead of 100% load (means it runs cooler... among many other things... )

But for full disclosure; I don't run the Sang anymore as I prefer a RAMPS with the extra functionality it offers... (too numerous to list, the least being 5 x Drivers, better LCD options, more pins to play with, etc). However the standard sang will do it quite comfortably as its still well within the specs for the MOSFET and only fractionally higher than the OEM provided solution...

I'm guessing here, but I'd suggest compactness and a reliable consistent set point and multiple extrusion temperatures. With air cooled heads running multiple materials (say PLA and ABS) you need to keep a reasonable amount of physical separation to ensure temperature isolation. With a water cooled 4 nozzle solution; if each nozzle is separately jacketed then its plausible that the required offset of each nozzle will be massively reduced. You could hang all 4 nozzles in a space not much bigger than the current print head. Using a traditional dual- or even tri-strusion setup would mean we'd loose half our build area due to separation, or we'd need a printer with twice as long an X-Axis This way you could have 4 nozzles in relatively close proximity.

And as mentioned, thermal isolation would play a factor. A 220°C extruder right next to a 190°C extruder that only have ambient to dissipate to, would be wildly competing with each other. The 220 dragged down and the 190 pulled up....

The decision as to if they are direct drive or extrusion based is probably a consideration at that point - I imagine for ultimate compactness you'd run as a bowden setup to get the smallest possible head foot print.

Plus the water cooling means that you'd be able to maintain a consistent temperature over a print for each individual nozzle compared to cooling to ambient - just like in PC cooling it may not *lower* your temps over ambient cooling (in fact, aggressive active cooling can probably get lower than standard water cooling) however with a reasonable flow rate you can *maintain* that set point longer.. so even when the PC's at 100% CPU it will only be a few degrees higher than Idle with a good tuned water setup... but it may not be lower than you could achieve at idle with active air, but it will be a lot more consistent...

Anyway, I have no idea - I'm just hypothesizing; haven't even seen a mechanical drawing for it!

DePartedPrinter
The whole reason for water cooling is that is able to remove more heat in a smaller weight and space. Using a fan/heatsink combo works great and is entirely appropriate for a single hotend, but a heatsink for 3 or more hotends would be silly-big/heavy. Using water lets us pack nozzles tightly under a compact lightweight cooler block. The individual nozzles aren't themselves going to perform significantly differently to an air cooled one, it's the fact that you get get more of them.

There is also the very valid point that op7ical makes, heated chambers mean that fan based heatsinking doesn't work effectively. Our testing and feedback from customers who have tried it point to 50C ambient being about the tops for the air-cooled E3D. Water obviously solves this issue.

Adrian, have you looked at how to mount a cooling fan on the print area yet?

I have ordered a bowden setup with mine, i was thinking of adjusting the mk4 lower bracket holding the extruder to wrap over the top of the carriage then drill down through it to give an extra fixing. I was wondering with the extruder motor out of the way whether I could mount a fan in its place and duct it somehow.

Have you seen the guy who mixes colours with three heads? If the melt zone is so short there must be a way of designing a head printing with cyan, yellow, magenta style filament and just moving the head out of the way to extrude until the new colour comes through then carrying on with the print?

Thanks for the heads up on the current situation.  I ordered mine on the 28th so I am guessing I wont see it for a few weeks at least.

SanjayM - Any update on lead time? I ordered a little over 3 weeks ago and was wondering if items are still being delayed.

You mean like Solidoodle themselves send out when you spend 10 times the money and wait two times as long ? Oh thats right.....

But seriously,  So far it doesn't sound too far past the 3 week pre-order limit thats mentioned right there when you buy it...

Bit ranty for a mere week delay

Have you tried contact the vendor directly, rather than relying on an unrelated forum Sanjay may not get to for another few days... If its an issue, try the most appropriate contact methods maybe

I don't see how a mini rant in public would help vs you sending, as you said, a simple email to the vendor,

That is an impressive self-recall. Well done Sanjay. You already have my order for 2 units but after seeing that I might get another for my girl friends prusa.

StaffordKnot, Krythis, Others waiting on parts

As adrian quoted me from the RepRap forums we have a bit of a delay going on. That sucks. We are sorry. We can't do much about it (Staff illness at the place that is doing the machined parts manufacture.)

Delay isn't going to be long - Everything except the heater-blocks will be with us on Friday. This means we can pack every single box with everything it needs, address label, customs label etc etc. The heater-blocks will arrive Monday or Tuesday, we can then do a super-rapid insertion of one block in each box and ship immediately.

Hope this allays fears and lets people know what is going on. As always, just ask if you have any questions. I don't mind if you do it on forums, or by email. In fact it can be quite helpful for others if your question is a more general one that many people may benefit from. However for the promptest response do email me or use the contact form on our website.

2n2r5
I appreciate the kind words, but really it's the only 'proper' way we could see to deal with this issue. We can't test every part we ship, but we do QC checks on batches of stuff we get in. The odd thing about this one is that some heaters in the batch are fine and dandy. Others not. With no pattern. I know that there is only really one top-level supplier for these parts, and I also know that this problem is not isolated to us at E3D. I expect we will see these bad cartridges start to filter out into general supply soon - so caveat emptor.