Choosing a Hotend

[Music] hello in today's video we will be going over hot end selection for your printer now the three hot ends you see in front of you here the slice mosquito the v6 and the triangle labs dragons these are the three hot ends that are currently supported by the voron ecosystem now if you are building a printer other than a voron these three hot ends are also excellent choices and i will be going over some of the pros and cons of each of these hot ends what this video will not be though is a direct comparison between print quality between the three hot ends because personally i do believe all these are good hot ends if you take the time to tune a slicer profile properly test and modify that profile for each of these hot ends in your printer and the printer has a good motion system is well built i do believe all three of these hot ends will produce roughly the same print quality in fact so so close of the print quality that you probably will never really notice any major difference and the average person will probably never be able to tell which hot end produced each print so i'm not going to parade a bunch of benchies in front of the camera here and compare my new details between them what i will be going over though are other factors that will drive your choice to picking one of these three hot ends for your printer now i will note that both these are actually the v1 version of both the dragon and the mosquito both of these have received upgrades since i've purchased these redesigns to the heatsink and heat break i believe but from what i've seen just consider that the new version is more reliable and maybe a slightly better but pretty much functionally i believe they are both the same so the first thing we're going to be looking at here is cost now for cost i am going to use united states dollars across the board and not factor in shipping depending on what country you're in uh what time of the year it is you know pre-roano post rona prices are going to vary with the slice mosquito for the standard version you are looking at around 150 usd for the v6 you are looking at between the e3d version you're looking at approximately seventy dollars and for the triangle labs version you're looking at about ten dollars for the hot end and then about five dollars for a titanium heat break upgrade the e3d version does not come with a stock titanium heat break and then for the triangle labs dragon you are looking at approximately 60 us and it does come with the plated copper nozzle i will not be going over heater cartridges thermistors or nozzles all three of these hot ends do support the same ecosystem of those items so i will not be reviewing those this video is just on the hot ends themselves so for mounting your thermistor and your heater the v6 and the dragon both have a similar style whereas the heater is clamped into position and then the thermistor or pt100 probe is held in with a grub screw now with the mosquito you do have to use this boron nitride thermal paste to hold your thermistor and your heater cartridge in the screws that you see on each end are simply to prevent it from falling out if the paste becomes loose because once you install it with the paste it does harden over time and it does become a firm hold on the thermistor and the heating cartridge so the stated advantage of the boron nitride thermal paste is it does give a full 360 envelope and heat absorption from the heater into the metal and also heat transfer from the metal into the thermistor so that is stated as an advantage however in practicality um i don't really notice too much of a difference i don't know if between the thousands of hours i have on the mosquito and a v6 i really can't tell if this isn't that big of an advantageous system and if it does outweigh the negatives of having to use this paste uh removing the heater and the thermistor can be an issue because this does harden up and it does make a mess when installing it doesn't make swapping these items quick and easy it doesn't turn them into a process also on the block style such as this you do have your thermistor quite a ways away from your heater cartridge whereas on the slice mosquito we do have the thermistor right next to the heater cartridge the advantage of doing it this way is you do have a more accurate temperature reading of the heater which does in my opinion lead to more stable temperatures now some do say on the block style such on on the v6 and the dragon by having the temperature probe on the opposite side of the heater cartridge with the filament path in the way you are taking a temperature reading through the filament some argue that that is a better way of retaking your temperature either way though once you have these installed pid tuned and then you run a temperature tower and you calibrate your temperatures to the print quality and results that you want once they're tuned and up and running there really is no perfectly functional difference between the two i found between switching from a v6 to a mosquito my temperature graph was a little bit more stable with the mosquito versus the v6 however print quality really i couldn't tell any functional difference between temperature output of the plastic and any improvement or impact to print quality now another thing to take into account with the heater block is the actual melt zone of each of these hot ends and these are all three standard flow hot ends and if you take a look you would think the hot end melt zone would be from the top of the block to the bottom of the nozzle on all three however the way they are designed is actually quite different on both the mosquito and the dragon the melt zone is actually from the top of the copper here to the bottom of the nozzle and again from the top of the copper to the bottom of the nozzle so if you take a look inside you will see that the nozzle is actually touching copper and then you have the heat break so what that means is you have even heat distribution from the block from the point of the heat break all the way down to where the plastic is extruded so in terms of melt zone size for standard flow the mosquito is the largest followed by the dragon now if you look at a v6 style you do have heat transference from the block into the nozzle but if you look up that is titanium this is a titanium heat break so in essence you have very good heat transfer from aluminum into the brass and then not so good heat transfer from aluminum into the titanium heat break because the heat break is made out of titanium to prevent heat creep so when it comes to the size of the melt zone on your three hot ends the mosquito's the best and the v6 is the worst in my opinion now moving up we have the heat break now this is the portion where we want to basically stop the heat transfer as much as possible as quickly as possible so on again both the dragon and the mosquito the filament path is a very very thin stainless steel surgical tube whereas on the v6 we have the titanium heat break continues up into the heatsink and then it's taken over by your ptfe tube further up now if you look at the size of the heat sinks themselves on both the dragon and the mosquito they are comparably much smaller than the v6 but they're also made of copper and much thinner than the v6 now in terms of practical cooling and the ability to fight heat creep when i ran a v6 in my voron v2 enclosed printing abs so i had a 240 degree nozzle in a roughly 50 degrees celsius ambient temperature i had to run a 40 20 millimeter server grade fan to fight heat creep and that's also with a titanium heatsink with these guys um a plain jane uh 4010 style axial fan off aliexpress has zero issues and i know people printing um enclosed with these guys with 30 millimeter fans without issue so in terms of how good the heatsink works at dissipating heat these two are miles ahead of the v6 now all three do work especially now with the latest revision of the v2 with the afterburner that has much more airflow available so the heat creep issues of previous vorons with the v6 are pretty much a thing of the past however it still shows how much more airflow this thing needs to prevent heat creep versus these two because these two will be fine with a 30 millimeter fan all day in an enclosed chamber printing abs now another thing i'm going to touch on here is the way that the heat blocks attach to the heatsink now looking at these hot ends these two look roughly the same size it's a little bit bigger but this is just a mounting point so you would think that they're all roughly the same however looking at both of these the black portion here isn't actually required at all for printing these are simply mounts whereas this this whole thing is needed and the way that the hotend is attached to your printer is through this black aluminum frame here but these don't serve any purpose when it comes to actually printing they don't they don't they're not heat sinks these are not your heat sinks the copper portion is your heat sink these are to mount and they do dissipate some heat because they do receive some heat through the screw mounts and standoffs for attaching your heater block to them but the beauty of the design of these two is it makes your heat break and your heatsink non-structural items so you can make them much thinner much lighter and it allows them to bleed off the heat much more quickly than a v6 now on a v6 your heat break is structural so on the standard flow if you have a nozzle strike you you crash the nozzle i've seen these been okay and also because they are now structural they have to be able to take any force on the heater block so a nozzle strike nozzle crash so that means they have to be a little bit thicker so that means more mass means more heat transferring from the heater block to the heat sink and also more heat creep with these these are thin the heat breaks are very thin if you look at them so another reason that the rigid mounting is the best way of attaching a heat block to your printer is one-handed nozzle changes so on both the dragon and the mosquito you can do a one-handed nozzle change so with this mounted in your printer you simply unscrew your nozzle and torque it to back to spec now mosquitoes claims that you do not need to hot tighten your nozzle i personally have done dozens of nozzle changes without hot tightening it and had zero leak issues on the dragon i don't have as many hours so i can't verify that but they are mechanically the same so they should function the same on the v6 you have to heat tighten them and also you do not have one-handed nozzle changes because of the way it's constructed where everything screws together and this screws into this block this screws into this block the heatsink the heat break screws into the heat sink when you go to undo it you don't know what's coming loose the heat break can unscrew from the heat sink your nozzle can unscrew from the heat block which is what you want but also the block can unscrew from the heat break as well so when you do a nozzle change on a v6 you have to get a wrench in there and hold on to the block and unscrew the nozzle now depending on the design of your hot end assembly that may not be feasible you may have to take apart a portion of your printer to change the nozzle and you have wires in the way you risk damaging wires you wish bending them it just makes things more of a hassle so if you plan on doing lots of nozzle changes or even just the odd random one don't look at the v6 and unfortunately they kept this design for the hamera so i'm not looking at the hamera because in reality the himara is basically the exact same thing from the bottom with a heatsink that's attached to a motor that's now trying to cool the heater block and the motor um i'm not personally a fan of the hemara i don't believe it brings enough to the table to warrant looking into that and also it's not a hot end it's mostly an extruder strap to a hot end so this portion alone here really dates the v6 style it makes it look antiquated and for that i definitely recommend these two over that if you plan on doing nozzle changes with any regularity now when it comes to mounting this is the biggest advantage of these two um with the dragon and the mosquito they are capable of rigid mounting so what that means is you can literally screw these to whatever you're mounting them to now on the mosquito you have the option of screwing it from the side so you can mount it such as this or you can screw it from the top whereas the dragon is only top mount capable on the v6 we have groove mount now the dragon does come with an adapter for groove mount but the first thing you should do when you get your dragon is you remove these little screws take your groovement out and throw it in the garbage because groove mount frankly is antiquated and needs to go away i have seen so many times on help forums for printers of people asking why they're having issues with their print and it turns out their groove mount on their especially reprap printer um this is most common has come loose so now the nozzle and the whole hot end assembly has play in it and i've seen it myself where i you know i was new at printing i printed a mount everything was nice and tight but after you know a couple dozen hours of printing the plastic had deformed ever so slightly and now my hot end is no longer mounted and also when you go to do your nozzle changes many many times i have dealt with a hot end that decides to spin when you're trying to loosen a nozzle so groove mount while it is the simplest way of mounting it's not really precise and rigid enough moving forward in 3d printing so this method of removing the whole heater block and heatsink assembly from the mounting of the hot end is the biggest advantage of these two styles over the v6 and then you add on top of it the quick change nozzle allowing you to do one-handed nozzle changes which also comes from the rigid mounting when it comes to high flow variants the mosquito and the dragon simply extend the melt zone portion upwards because again your heater block ends here on both so there is room to extend the melt zone up without changing the form factor of either hotend whereas with the v6 there really is no room to move up so they have to move down so with the volcano or the super volcano you simply add more mass below the heat break this uses the same heater the super volcano uses a larger heater but again all this extra weight and mass is now still sitting on the exact same heat break and is now more of a pivot point so if you remember any of your physics classes the closer something is to a point when force is applied there is less force on the point so when you push that point further out or even further out on the super volcano if you have any nozzle strike while traveling you're putting a lot of force on that heat break when it comes to actual output though of the high flow variance the volcano variant actually does beat the mosquito and the dragon however for the average person in my opinion unless you absolutely need the increased volume of the volcano i would still stick with the high flow variant of the mosquito or the dragon simply for the ease of use and potential reliability in the event that you do have a nozzle strike or any type of crash the volcano just seems more likely to break in my opinion and also the the ability to use the same form factor the same amounts you're not really having to adjust you're not losing uh z-axis i i do feel that the volcano is kind of again an antiquated way of doing a high-flow hot hotend now do you need a high flow variant it really comes down to what you will be printing personally i run normal flow variants on all my printers i print with a 0.4 millimeter nozzle at 0.2 millimeter layer heights for about 99 of the prints i run and i can run those variants at speeds up to about 150 millimeters per second at 0.4 nozzle 0.2 layer height without out running the hot end if you are one of those that wishes to run a 0.8 millimeter or one millimeter nozzle or you are pushing 300 millimeters per second constantly because you really want to run at the edge then i would look into the high flow variance but again personally i would stick to either the mosquito or the dragon and sacrifice a little bit of the output of the volcano for the added reliability and ease of tuning because with the high flow variants with the larger melt zone you are going to have issues with more stringing and more oozing so while you can remove most of those issues with proper tuning that is something you are going to have to definitely pay attention to so choice between the three which one do i recommend i will give pros and cons for all of them and then i will leave with my final decision so starting off with the v6 and i will say if you are going with the v6 the really the only reason to go with the v6 is budget now while a e3d v6 you are looking at about 70 dollars the triangle labs v6 honestly i can't tell a difference i actually don't know which components on this are e3d which are triangle labs i have run both variants in printers with thousands of hours and honestly for comparing a triangle lab v6 with a titanium heat break for 15 versus a standard e3d v6 for 60 or 70 depending on where you are and where you're sourcing it from i cannot recommend buying an e3d v6 there really is no advantage to buying it over a triangle labs and the triangle labs v6 is only if you are really looking for a budget option now again all three do produce good prints okay so if you are going to take the time to tune a profile all three of these will produce good prints however when it comes to all the other factors other than cost both these hot ends beat a v6 so if you are going to go with v6 because you are looking to save get a triangle labs v6 get the titanium heat break don't bother looking at an e3d unfortunately their their hot in from several years ago is still a hot in from several years ago i'm waiting on them to come along with something better but until then i i simply can't recommend buying an e3d v6 so the next one here would be the dragon hot end so the reason the go for the dragon hot end is it is definitely an upgrade over the v6 pretty much everything the dragon does is better than a v6 other than cost so we do have the same style of heater block where we have the thermistor further away from the heater cartridge and then we do have the copper heatsink the melt zone is smaller than the mosquito so the output of the standard flow is a little bit less than a mosquito but still more than a v6 and we do have the rigid mounting so if you are looking to spend a little bit more the dragon is definitely a very good solid option and last we have the mosquito hotend now the mosquito hotend does have the largest mount zone of these three hot ends and personally i do find i have had the most reliable hours on this hot end versus the other three now the dragon i very few hours on this one is going to be installed in my voron zero soon i've actually only run it once in my v2 just simply to make sure that it does work however simply throwing it in and running it with my mosquito settings the prints were pretty much the same i couldn't tell any difference and i've been running one of these in my v2 for a few thousand hours with absolutely zero issues i haven't had any jams any clogs this thing has been 100 reliable for me i cannot say the same of my v6s i have run multiple v6s e3d and triangle labs in vorons my v1 my v2 um the odd clog nozzle changes being a pain i personally have had the best luck with the mosquito so when it comes to the mosquito though looking at the features there are some drawbacks now as you can see this one still has a heater cartridge and thermistor installed and the reason for that is is i actually pulled this one out of a printer and i not gonna be taking these out because it's just an absolute pain to reinstall these with the boron paste and the mess so that is a downside to these hot ends is having to deal with the paste if you do run out of paste and i will say this stuff does one tube will last you um pretty much a lifetime unless you're doing a heater swap every week then it might last you know half a lifetime but it is something you know you're gonna have to look into if you lose the pace you're gonna have to order some more you simply can't just do undo a screw and swap your heater cartridge out so that is something and also when it comes to the form factor as you can see comparing a normal block such as on the v6 or the dragon to the mosquito block the mosquito block is much wider now it's not much bigger but it's wider on the x-axis now depending on how your cooling ducts are routed we have noticed that this style does output more heat sideways and we have noted as a lot of melted ducts coming from printers running mosquitoes now we have redesigned the ducts and we have looked into alternate materials so it's not really that you know much of a deal breaker of an issue but depending on the design of your mount that is something you're going to have to look into is the fact that this puts out more heat sideways than these other two designs so which one do i recommend in terms of which one is the best personally even though with the boron paste and the wider heater block issue putting more heat out sideways and melting some ducts personally if i only had to run one hot end for the rest of my life i would stick with the mosquito however i already have this mosquito and it is bought and paid for if i am building a printer i'm going with the dragon the reason for that is it comes down to price and benefits this is double if not more the price of this performance wise they're within a margin of error percentage this is easier to work on it's easier to swap heater cartridges it's easier to swap thermistors if you do want to mount this in a printer that currently takes a v6 you can use the groove mount you know groove mount needs to die and it is just hard to recommend the mosquito over the dragon when again it's such a big price difference so while this is and you can argue this to the you know the cows come home this is a better hot end than the dragon it is not double the price better it may be a couple dollars you know 10 20 is better but not double the price better than a dragon so for building your printer i will recommend a dragon hotend now this is actually the hotend i have the least amount of time on i will be full and upfront about this but these ideas that i'm passing to you are based on not only my opinion but opinions of others that i have noticed in several forums and i'm trying to give a abject real world comparison between these three and not just comparing you know static prints i'm comparing having used these these two specifically for thousands of hours what i would recommend and that would be the dragon so i hope you have enjoyed this video uh this is a subject that does come up quite frequently in the voron discord which if you haven't joined yet please go to vorondesign.com and follow the link for our discord it is an active and growing community and i felt getting my opinion out there would help others in when it comes to their choice of which hotend to choose for building their printer if you would like to see more content such as this don't forget to like and subscribe to the channel and if you do have any further questions please feel free to ask them in the comments below i do make it a point to try and answer as many of those as i can thank you be safe wash your hands and have a great day [Music] you

Channel: Nero 3dp

Views: 65,667

Rating: 4.8535395 out of 5

Keywords: voron, design, voron design, corexy, core, xy, printer, 3d, 3dp, 3d printer, hotend, slice, mosquito, e3d, v6, triangle labs, triangle, labs, e3d v6, tl v6, dragon, dragon hotend, extruder, skeeter, afterburner, abs, mount, choose, decide, nero, nero 3dp, v1, v0, v2, v2.4, guide, how to, v2.2, vzero

Id: kTI86ZhNLTw

Length: 29min 0sec (1740 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SnowDrifter_]

Mosquito magnum user here, chiming in

I don't know what black magic witchcraft they have going on inside that thing. But it prints just as well at 60mm^3/s going 150mm/s on a 0.8 nozzle as it does doing fine detail work with a 0.25 at 0.04 layer height.

I'll get some stringing/oozing with larger nozzles, but frankly, I'm not sure if that's a heat zone issue or just an artifact of larger nozzles. I'm inclined to believe the latter as I get no notable stringing on 0.4 and smaller nozzles after tuning in pressure advance and retraction for the material I'm working with. That being said, I also use ridiculously high travel speeds and have found that doing so does a good job of 'breaking' a string.

I'll fanboy a bit here. The 'skeeter is art. I'm happy to see something on the market that breaks the mold, so to speak. I've always thought the e3d design was a bit, respectfully, stupid.

And regarding the design... On one hand, I understand the cost of producting a new product. I also respect that they use only premium materials and build quality in their design. On the other, I fear that Slice's patent might be counter to the generally open source rhetoric of 3d printing we've developed. I would LOVE to see more hotends on the market designed with similar features. However, I fear that such a locked down design might keep the e3d style as 'meta' for more basic machines, as let's be real: The mosquito is not a cheap date.

Ok so I let my brain run a little bit, and what was supposed to be a 'here's my experience with one of those' post turned into a rambling.

[u/[deleted]]

Grab the Dragon before the patents are granted

This gem of a hotend is too much of an opportunity to pass on

[u/0nn0]

So what's your take on the point the guy from Design Prototype Test is trying to make? (source: https://invidio.us/watch?v=XYInrD-Vaak) ^{(Forgot his name})

Is it morally acceptable to use a design like the trianlge labs hotend if it kills innovation?

[u/Blondersheel]

Great video 👍

[u/quixotic120]

Thanks for this! I built my printer back when the v6 was the only real option and while I’ve heard of these other option I haven’t had the time to really research what the differences are

[u/etrigan63]

What was the torque wrench Nero used to tighten the nozzle?

[u/wywywywy]

Nice video.

So is the Dragon supported by all V0 / V1.8 / V2.4 without modding?

[u/m0j0j0_j0]

Love you Nero.