PEEK insulator broke... How bout wood?

Solidoodle sells the PEEK by itself.

Thank you Gary! I like the renewable alternative! Did you harvest it from a young plant? There aren't any sources for bamboo cylinders here other than baby house plants from Target. Maker gear's site is indeed out of peek insulators. I think I will try this before spending the $27 + S&H for the solidoodle PEEK.

Gary, if you don't mind, I am pasting a section from your site below:

"A piece of bamboo that cut from a plant last year was used, but one could find something suitable and cheap from a garden center.    The key is to find bamboo thick enough that will allow a hole wide enough to hold your nozzle to be drilled in.
The size of an individual segment seemed to work well, and simply cut at the first knuckle.
A 3mm hole was drilled the length of the piece for the feedstock entrance, and then the nozzle end was widened by 5mm part of the way down (however far the nozzle should be screwed in).
The feedstock entrance was reamed slightly to provide a wider opening for the feedstock to find its way.
Wetting the bamboo makes it slightly flexible, so before screwing in the nozzle the entrance was soaked under a tap. This may or may not really help, but so far the nozzle in the test pieces have remained tight and secure.
Several means of attaching the hot end to the extruder were explored. Shown here are several T-bar approaches, and one which utilises the non-symetric nature of the bamboo to create a type of twist-lock mechanism."

Vince7c95, if you can get http://garyhodgson.com/reprap/2011/05/b … k-or-ptfe/ to load on a different system, there is a great write-up here with pictures.

I attempted to do this with bamboo stalk from home depot, and the qu-bd hot-end. Every section that was thick enough to fit the mk4 extruder had too big  of a hollow area to press fit the nozzle barrel. I ended up sticking a smaller diameter piece inside a larger one to fit, but this was a mistake; my extruder nozzle was simply pushed out by the filament. Re-reading the above link, I realized I needed something to hold the hot end up, such as what the original, very tedious to remove hot end mount from Solidoodle provided. I tried attaching a metal angled piece between the aluminum block and an m6 nut on the barrel, then drilling out two holes so this assembly would fit on the quick release pegs (of Lawsy's mk4). PLA + Metal Heatsink hotend holder = not good.  Let me know how your attempts go, as I am very anxious to get an alternative hot end up and running.