The emperors new cloths
There is this tale from Hans Cristian Andersen that tells about two crooked tailors that tricked en emperor to tailor him wonder cloths.
And they told him that only quality people can see the clothes. They stripped the emperor naked and nobody said anything.
I unscrewed by mistake the top of my E3D hotend and it leaked.
I bought a BondTech with a Mosquito some while ago and I said... Maybe this is the moment to try it out.
I am quiet new to 3D Printing and after looking around for many years it was obvious to me, that in this field you buy the same stuff for a huge difference of money. So I went for the Prusa i3 MK3S+.
The first thing that comes to my mind after buying the incomplete BondTech Mosquito upgrade with free shipping ... Man do I appreciate the Prusa Extruder now ... and about the Mosquito assembling :
So after understanding that I missed some part, for the price of 45 Euro, but you can get it for 8$ (if you order about 20 pieces) ... And there is a second one ... that you may print on your own ... I had no conductive stuff ... so I went online ... 10+ Euro and ... 45 five for the transport from Sweden to the other end of Europe ... almost the price of a cheap plane ticket ... so I went to 3DJake and got the wonder chemical way cheaper ... don't understand me wrong ... it is not so much the money as it is the proportion ...
I finally got every piece together ... did the firmware upgrade ... and ... after struggling for many hours to get a successful layer calibration with CPE Black Soul (very beautiful material) ... I was printing a ghost membrane ... a true spider web ... and I started digging .... Flow rate ... Linear K factor ... nozzle temperature .... I almost got a thermistor from BondTech for 50+ Euro and another 45 for transport .... and finally ... after many many many meters of beautiful Black Soul CPE ... squeezing my head as close as possible to see the layer ... my eyes fell on the nozzle turbine ... and I though ... maybe it's not the smartest thing on earth to blow with one fan into the cooling part of the Mosquito and with a turbine into the block of the hotend and the top of the nozzle ... so I took it of and suddenly it started to behave more like the good old printer ... I mean it does not dry out over a 20 minutes or so ... but it still needs at least 10 more degrees of temperature and a flow rate of 250 ...
The Mosquito though seems a nice little piece of engineering ... but if you start blowing air into it while trying to heat ... I imagine the heat distribution that results... and it starts to build a very thin layer inside ... that thickens and thickens ... until you have to go through a filament change ... and here you go again ...
Regarding the E3D V6 ... I hope one day someone drills a little hole into the top and puts a screw there to build the possibility to lock it into place inside the housing ... so hit me ... kick me out for not seeing the emperor clothes ... at least one thing I can say after many days of digging ... there is much wisdom in Josef Prusa's words: Happy Printing!
RE: The emperors new cloths
RE: The emperors new cloths
(Log entry '9'99 ... starship Enterprise)
Finally, after installing back the MK3S+ firmware and erasing all data ... and then installing again the Bondtech Mosquito firmware and erasing all data etc. ... the 3:1 gear ratio compensation is ok-ish ... there is still some under-extrusion ... compared to the same nozzle (Bondtech 0,25 mm) on the E3DV6 ... but the Mosquito still goes cold ... from the fan ...
BTW. I miss the filament load from the Prusa extruder ... it was so sensitive ... you felt the little ball with the magnet and the rest was running like butter on a hot window glass ... Here ... you have to unscrew completely ... let it grab the filament and after feeling it passed by the two gears ... just one driven by the gear ... you have to push it down the path until you feel it going into the PTFE and reaching the nozzle ... or answer 10 times: Nope ... ain't no filament yet! ... so Happy printing everybody (else)!
RE: The emperors new cloths
(Log entry - only '9'69 ... starship: The Orville)
I remember the old days working on an SGI . Everything was hundreds to tens of thousand of U.S Dollars. And when the day came to buy a SCSI cable ... I got an offer for 2000 USD I am not kidding ... seriously 2000 USD .... and I asked: What does this cable do for that kind of money? Walk the dog? do the laundry? ... and I got an answer the sounded like: the magnetic field among those 168 pins is protected so the neutrinos will not melt the earth core ....
I took a look at the Bond-tech LGX ... with the non U.S patent Copperhead ... so they new about all the flaws ... but they still sold me the Mosquito with that Fan Shroud a few weeks ago .... what can I say ... Geko's Speech message in Wall Street 2 was clear and strong: Love your neighbour ... and remember ... the value is not in the printer but in the creation that is born with the print!
RE: The emperors new cloths
(Log entry - 101010 ... earth)
Whenever blowing is involved in a job, you have to take matters very seriously because it obviously affects the quality of the extrude.
After many tweaks, some that look very very ugly and the pleasant surprise, that the filament load unload is working properly, here is a 0.05 mm layer height print, done with a 0.25 nozzle of a slightly modified shroud without a printer enclosure and with a 255 fan speed, in comparison to the original 0.1 mm powder burned by laser print. The CPE one looks a bit dirty because of the crips highlights in the picture but in reality it is a very beautiful shiny material.
I went through the retraction towers test and in comparison to the default setting for the CPE, the best results I get (absolutely no stringing - subjective judge depending on the diopter of my glasses), is after raising retraction from 2 mm to 6 mm.
I assume that, the quiet brutal movement of the filament helps having the proper pressure difference for the viscosity.
RE: The emperors new cloths
The heartbreak of the Mosquito after a few weeks of use.
The CPE got stuck in the heat-break. The margin of the inner side, that is loose, must have been caught by the filament.
I took the hot-end out of the extruder and put the it into a clamp to let it heat to 275 C by the printer.
Then I tried to push the filament out wit a very small screwdriver. The filament must have gotten behind the inner cylinder. It broke off with the end of the heat-break glued to the hot-end.. There is now way to unscrew it. ... maybe PLA and PETG is the limit. Beyond that probably he metal gets to soft ...
