All Metal Hotend - Ender 3 - Chris's Basement

should you go to an all metal hotend versus one that has a ptfe liner in it like on your creality 3d printer i have some thoughts on this hello everyone chris here and upgrading to an all metal hot end isn't anything new the biggest reason you might want to do that is so you can print higher temp filaments on a lot of 3d printers they have a ptfe lined hot end like on a creality machine and it goes all the way down to the nozzle that tube is really only good to around 250 c after that it starts to degrade and it can off gas some pretty harmful things so you don't want to do that so switching to the all metal hot end that will get you a much higher temperature range and that's all fine and good but i have a lot of questions about this upgrade they can be somewhat expensive they are pretty easy to do but can it improve your print quality overall and is it the hot end that's improving it or maybe just a little higher grade nozzle so that's what we're going to do today we're going to take the micro swiss direct swap out ender 3 replacement it works on a lot of creality printers move it to this almost completely stock ender 3 do some tests on different nozzles just to see the results this should be somewhat interesting so let's start by taking a look at the micro swiss kit so here's what we have this kit i got directly off the micro swiss site it was 63 dollars and 50 cents so keep that in mind if you're going to upgrade your hot end there are a lot of hot ends that work with the ender 3 but this is probably the highest quality one that is a direct swap out same form factor in the kit you do get a nozzle a microsys branded one it is a 0.4 same in this on an inner three you get a heat block this kit is compatible with the stock block but we're going to go ahead and swap out to this one because i have no doubt it is a little higher quality we have our heat sink it's pretty close to the stock configuration some hardware you do get some collet clips for that bowden tube and probably think in the kit that's going to change the most out of all of this is the heat break this one is made out of titanium the break should be the point where you go from solid filament to liquid filament right before extrusion so a very important part in the hot end design you also get a silicone sock and a little wrench to put the whole thing together so the parts i'm mostly interested in are the brake and the nozzle now on a stock reality machine you don't really have much of a transition zone you have a ptfe tube that goes all the way down to the nozzle after it comes out of the tube it flashes to liquid pretty much right inside that nozzle as it's coming out now when you have a heat break like in this design you have a bit of a transition zone so there's a spot on that break that tries to separate the hot end and the cold side of that heat sink and because it's all metal you can print higher temps and that's the change that i'm really interested in testing does it improve any print quality even on pla also the nozzle not all nozzles are created equal here we have an e3d nozzle the ones that come on the creality machine and then the one that comes in the micro swiss kit now the e3d style they're just a bit different and not designed to work with this setup they're the same thread pattern they're designed a little bit differently but they're also just a bit longer although they might work they are not technically compatible with this ecosystem now take these two nozzles the type that come from creality the one with micro swiss these are just cheaper brass nozzles i'm not even sure what the angle is on the inside here but one difference i always see is take a look at the input on a creality nozzle and then compare it to the micro swiss side by side you can see the microslice is much larger and it is machined around the lip there's a bit of a chamfer in there and without being able to see inside and what's actually going on in the nozzle this could be the difference in between higher quality or less quality prints so right off the bat before we get started i'm going to say that an all-metal hot end probably isn't going to improve your print quality on something like an ender 3. it's made mostly to be able to use higher tint filaments in fact if you print pla on an all metal hotend you might introduce jamming because that pla really likes to stick to it so keep that in mind also this is a completely stock ender 3. all i've done is remove the psu so i can use it in an enclosure and i've upgraded the bed springs so that i can achieve higher temps on the bed because the stock springs like to give out at around 80 c also this is stock firmware you might not be able to achieve over a 250 c temperature on this firmware the limit is set pretty low so you'd have to flash to a new version of marlin to increase that high temp so let's go ahead and run a quick test print on this machine as it is right now stock because i've actually only done one print ever on this machine and that was abs for the enclosure video so let's get a baseline print in [Music] and here's our baseline print all in all the stock ender 3 turns out a pretty nice print it's a little bit inconsistent here and there you can see the candy strapping up here that's from the stepper drivers not a huge deal but not a bad print at all so this is where we're going to start now for the next test i don't want to upgrade the hot end yet i'm just going to switch out to the microswiss nozzle and run a test print just to see if it makes any difference on this stock hot end it is a little different shaped looking at the nozzles once again this is the stock one remember from creality it has a six millimeter hex on it and the microsys version is actually a seven millimeter hex so remember that if you're grabbing a socket to change these out the thread length is the same as stock again bore slightly bigger so i'm just going to preheat the nozzle to about 220 or so pla that's usually enough to soften it up so you can back the nozzle out i removed the silicone sock that i had i'm going to use my torque wrench here with a six millimeter socket and a pair of pliers and i'll just back it out be careful with your thermistor and heater wires this is a fairly new nozzle again this is only my second print stock nozzle is out i'll switch to a seven millimeter socket and we'll put the new nozzle right back in and our stock silicone socks should still fit over that new nozzle even though it is just a little bit larger nozzle swap done we'll go ahead and check for level make sure it's not any higher or lower and then we'll run that test print again this is also a great time to mention even though you're just switching out a nozzle depending on what it's made out of if you're going from brass to steel or whatever it might be you might have to adjust the temperature up or down a bit because not all of them are going to accept heat the same way there's a lot of good guides out there to give you a reference of how much change you should make just be aware of that when you're printing if it doesn't seem quite right you might have to dial in the temperature a bit on with the test print [Music] and here's the print after the nozzle swap there's a couple of sections here where it might be just a little bit under extruded you can compare that to the stock print that's this one over here and that might be related to heat it might be printing just a little bit cooler than the stock nozzle was also it might be the extrusion setting you might have to bump up your steps but you have to calibrate that and i would definitely go through a calibration if you're going to swap out a hot end or nozzle so this is stock this is after the nozzle swap and then this one is after i bump the e steps by a millimeter so you can combat this in a few different ways but definitely test your temperature and check your e-steps run through some calibrations when you're doing anything like this now let's move on to the hot end upgrade so i'm gonna go ahead and preheat once again remove the sock and pull out that nozzle from the stock hot end before we start our swap the nozzle's out and while it's up to temp now i like to go ahead and pull the tube because remember it does go all the way down to the nozzle pull your filament out and then we can get the bowden tube out with the nozzle out you should be able to just push down on this clip and pull that tube out sometimes that is easier said than done if this tube does get stuck you can go ahead and back the coupler out with a 10 millimeter wrench you can usually get the coupler off that way inspect the tube for damage though if it has a hole in it or it's been pinched you might want to go ahead and replace that tube you don't want that causing you any under extrusion issues i just removed the whole tube we go ahead and let the printer cool down and once the tube is out it's much easier to pull that coupler off it gets caught in the section that it's actually trying to keep there's a little ring around there but the tube still should be usable in this state there's not much print time on this one at all but definitely check it so we'll take off our fan shroud that's this screw and this screw over here let's swing it out of the way then there's only two screws to hold the hot in on these two right here back those up and our hot end is loose now like i mentioned before you could reuse this heat block if you wanted to we're going to use the one that came with the micro swiss but we do have to back out our heater and our thermistor because we're going to reuse those we don't want to have to rewire or replace those so on the bottom there's a set screw that holds the heater in we'll back that one out and then the heater and thermistor actually taped together with some captain tape the thermistor is held in by a phillips head screw on the side that one right there so we'll just go ahead and take that one out as well and with that one backed out you should be able to just pull both at the same time be careful of those thermistor wires they're pretty delicate and now the hot ends out then we can go ahead and build our micro swiss hot end the two screws on this heat block to hold the heater on i'm gonna put those facing down so my new heat break i'll screw it into the top it does have two flat spots on it it does take a seven millimeter wrench they give you a little wrench in the kit no need to tighten it up too much just make it snug then i'll go ahead and put my nozzle on the other side we will torque it once it's up to temp after we get it installed then the heat sink on my heat block i want the heater and thermistor to come in from the right side like it does on stock so the flat side of your heat block that's the back so i want it in here just like this there's a groove in this break that this grub screw goes into so you just set it down like that and then you have some grub screws in the kit these are kind of nice because they actually do lay flat on the table and just snug up your grub screw to keep it from moving from side to side back to the printer we'll go ahead and put our heater and thermistor back in but i want you to notice on the end of this hot end where you put in your bowden tube it doesn't go down inside there very far just enough to guide it into the hot end so there's a lot of heat sink in between the end of the tube and your nozzle just be aware of that micro swiss does give you a replacement screw for your thermistor i suggest you go ahead and swap it out it just goes in between the wires right like that and then both of these will slide in at the same time you have two holes here the top one is the thread one where the screw goes thermistor goes in the bottom one i like to screw down the thermistor first don't get carried away you don't want to pinch the wires then make sure that heater is flush in the front here and you can screw down these two screws to hold the heater in make sure that heater isn't going anywhere but having this sandwich design rather than that set screw holding it in that's going to be a lot better at pushing the heat into the heat block there should be a little more contact surface there microsys also gives you a couple of countersunk screws to put your hot in back on your printer i suggest you use those as well the holes on the hot end do have a bit of a chamfer so those will set in there but it goes right back on just like stock that chamfer should also make sure it's nice and straight it just makes it set in there a little bit better then we can put our fan shroud back on and now that everything's back together i suggest you go ahead and cut just a bit off the end of this bowdoin tube you might want to shorten this up a bit depending on the hot end swap that you did you won't need near as much and you don't want any more bowden tube than you have to have but for now i'm just going to cut the end off to get rid of all this gunk and make sure that it's nice and smooth inside i'll just use my capricorn cutter here to make sure it's nice and flush on the end i probably cut about 15 millimeter then we can put it down in the collet we'll lift up on it a bit and we'll put on our 3d printed collet clip that microswiss gave us and there we go we're almost done i do want to do a pid tune and we'll get it up to temp and torque that nozzle we're up to temp i have it set on 250 and we'll torque that nozzle and then we can put on our nice new silicone sock now let's head to the computer and do our pid auto tune you can do an m503 to see what all your settings are and you can do an m301 just to list the pid settings but we're going to do the auto tune anyway it's a good idea anytime you change anything around your heater thermistor hot end so we'll do m303 let's do c for a count of 10 that's 10 cycles and we want to do e for our extruder heater or hot end heater e zero negative one would be bad and then set a temperature with s on pretty much any hobby hot ends 3d printer i like to tune to 210. it's a nice middle of the road temp for printing most plastics and let's go ahead and let that run while the auto-tune is running i wanted to remind you one more time that anytime you change something about your extruder your hot end your nozzle you're going to want to go back and calibrate a few things again like your e-steps the temperature for the filament that you're printing your extrusion width your flow rate and definitely go back and level your bed because you don't know if the height has changed from the nozzle to the print surface you don't want to collide just go back and check a few things anytime you make an adjustment or upgrade our auto tune is complete we're not too far off from the stock settings but again this is really good to run anytime you make a change and you can use the u flag on your m303 to just save it automatically and use those settings but you can also update it with that m301 so we'll do m301 p and we got 26 and then we'll do i we got a 2.71 and then a d 66.53 that will update them you can just do that m301 again to make sure they're correct and then m500 to save it to eprom and our upgrade is complete let's go ahead and run another test [Music] and here's our attempt with our all metal hotend print quality looks pretty much the same very minimal string remember this is the same g code for all these tests but you will notice a little bit of under extrusion in a couple of places it's most obvious right there that's because retraction is not going to act the same for an all metal hotend as it will for a ptfe lined one so that is definitely something as well as the bowden tube like i mentioned before you want to tune retraction in if you go to an all metal hot end it's going to change just a bit remember some plas actually like to get jammed in an all metal hot end and if you want to compare this one to the one we did stock same type of artifacts just a little bit under maybe still needs to be calibrated stock all metal so there it is and all metal hot end upgrade is complete and this video isn't to deter you from upgrading to an all metal hot end there's a lot of great ones out there including this direct swap out one from microswiss it is very high quality just do it for the right reasons it's not going to necessarily help your print quality any but if you want to print a little high temperature plastic you want to print inside of an enclosure this is the way to go you're not going to be able to print stuff like polycarbonate on your ptfe lined hot end so hopefully this was interesting or maybe a little helpful that's it for today and i'll see you really soon on the next one

Channel: Chris Riley

Views: 21,082

Keywords: 3D, printer, Printing, 3D Printing, 3D Printer, ChrisBasement, ChrissBasement, Chris'sBasement, Chris Basement, Chriss Basement, Chris's Basement, ChrisRiley, Chris Riley, benchy, 3dbenchy, 3d, Ender 3, Micro Swiss, Time lapse, Hotend, all metal, high temp

Id: ZJIEcRBNnN8

Length: 18min 25sec (1105 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021