Hi everyone, i’m Tom and today we’re going
to have a look at a potential solution to a problem some printer manufacturers don’t
really acknowledge: speed. And especially, speed for those insanely large
printers, like the BigRep, which, for example, has more than one meter of build space in
every direction. Now, if you simply use a regular-sized hotend
and nozzle, your print time is also going to increase proportionally with # each dimension
of the part you’re printing. Scale it up by a factor of two in just one
direction, and the print is going to take twice as long, but if you scale it to twice
the size in X, Y # and Z, the print time is going to be # eight times as long. So what # would be a tolerable print time
for a 20 by 20 by 20 centimeter build space, suddenly becomes a print that takes 1 hundred
and twenty five times as long if you entirely fill up a 1 cubic meter build space. And here’s where the E3D Volcano comes in:
It’s big. It’s fast. It’s long. And its nozzle has a gaping hole the size
of a nostril. Well, not quite, but it’s pretty large. So it’s really meant for printing plus-sized
models on plus-sized printers. Now, the Volcano kit itself builds on E3D’s
already proven designs and is meant as an upgrade for the v6 hotend, so the starter
kit only includes a heater block, a nozzle, a heater cartridge, a thermistor with heatshrink
and sleeving / and a few screws with a disposable hex wrench. You could reuse some of the parts that your
v6 or v5 heater block uses, but since essentially everything that is part of the heater block
sub-assembly is # included, it makes it somewhat easier to swap between the regular and the
long # Volcano heater block. The assembly itself is practically the same
as the regular v6 block: The thermistor is securely held in place with the same combination
of glass fiber sleeving and an M3 screw, the heater cartridge now sits vertically along
the melt zone and is clamped down with # two screws instead of one, which had the heater
block bending quite a bit when i tightened the screws the first time, which ultimately
didn’t matter, but it did look a bit scary at first. Either way, just like on the v6, it’s sure
to make much better contact with the heater block than other solutions for example using
a grub screw and such. Now, since this is basically just a new heater
block and nozzle, it still uses the standard M6 thread for the heat break, which means
that the Volcano should work with any hotend E3D ever released - so you can either use
the v6 heatbreak, as intended, or the v5 heatbreak and heatsink, or even the Kraken-style heatbreaks
that fit, obviously, the quad-hotend Kraken but can also be used in the Chimera and Cyclops
heatsink, you could essentially make a double-Volcano-Cyclops-v6-thing or even use it as quad-Volcano-Kraken-monster. Which would be absolutely insane. Be safe, kids. I’m going to use the Volcano on a v5 heatbreak
and heatsink, just because that’s what i happen to have strapped into my printer at
the moment. Now, obviously, the Volcano is a good bit
longer than the standard heater block, and so is the nozzle. The purpose here is that the filament will
have more time to thoroughly heat up, but it also means that you’ll be losing some
build height - looking at what kind kind of printer the Volcano is geared for, ok, it’s
not really going to make a difference, but it is something you should keep in mind when
setting up for the first print, as your Z endstop or any kind of bed probe # will indicate
the wrong height and possibly crash the Volcano right into the printbed. And since it has a longer lever to the turned-down
part of the heatbreak / when compared to a # standard block, it does make the already
# not-so-tough heatbreak another bit more fragile. So when it comes to actually printing with
the Volcano, it’s pretty much what you’d expect: since it has a .8 instead of a .4mm
nozzle, both your layer height and extrusion width should go up by about a factor of two,
for a total print time decrease by a factor of four. If you’re feeling lucky and confident that
your printer’s mechanics won’t start wobbling around like jello, you can even increase the
print speed past what you normally use with the regular heater block. The Volcano block seems to have plenty of
power left for pretty insane speeds, but one snag i ran into was my extruder simply not
being able to keep up anymore. I run a fairly standard Greg’s Wade extruder
that has a bit higher gear ratio than usual and i found that the stepper motor and driver
just couldn’t handle what were in fact ridiculously high speeds when i was trying to print the
first layer with a three millimeter extrusion width, a .8 mm layer height and something
around a 30mm/s feed rate. So if you really want to use all the speed
the Volcano can give you, you should definitely not be using one of the common Allegro drivers,
but preferably at least the Trinamic TMC 2100 or even TI’s DRV8825 drivers. Or, you know, any driver that can actually
make full use of the torque your extruder stepper motor can produce. Not only is the actual printing stupid fast
- i mean, look at this, this is the same part, and the Volcano just spat it out like it was
nothing. Ok, it only used like 15 layers for the entire
part, but that kinda like the point of the entire thing. One other thing that you initially don’t
think about is that slicing and transferring files around also gets faster, as there’s
simply much less data to be processed. While that’s, again, probably not so much
of an issue for smaller prints, it does make a very noticeable difference on the machines
the Volcano is intended for. The print quality is very much exactly what
i expected - when you’re printing fat layers with a large nozzle, of course you aren’t
going to get the same kind of detail reproduction that you’d get with a setup that’s optimized
for just that. But i’ve mentioned it before somewhere,
i like big bores, and i cannot lie, / having those visible, beautifully aligned layers
is very aesthetically pleasing in its own way. While it’s obviously not ideal for every
print, the look does work really well on simple shapes or whenever you want to emphasize the
digital or low-fi side of 3D printing. And for larger parts, the fatter layers become
much more of a texture for part instead of a visual artifact anyways. One thing that surprised me was how little
ooze the Volcano seems to have - this is a huge factor for those blobs that you see where
one extrusion line ends and the next one starts. And there is practically no ooze, i guess
that’s because the large nozzle allows only very little back-pressure to build up inside
the heated zone and relaxes tension in the filament along the feed path between the extruder
and the hotend. This is just cheap, white ABS that i use for
practically anything. PLA is obviously a bit runnier in both the
regular and in the Volcano E3D hotend, but the Volcano is still surprisingly good there. Which means that even lower layer heights
work decently with it, though i wouldn’t really want to use it below a 0.25mm layer
height. / Which is still very usable. And as always, i still need to mention the
price, which currently is 20 Great British Pounds, so around thirty units in Euros or
US dollars. If you want a bit of a bigger variety, you
can get the Volcano # eruption pack, i guess you can see where they’re going with this,
for 25 pounds, and get an additional three nozzles in different sizes, of which the largest
one is # 1.2mm. Which is insanely large, but it’s exactly
what you need when you run one of the enormously large printers. The pricing, i think, is very ok, considering
that you’re getting a well-engineered, finished product and not some Chinese clone ripoff
monstrosity. The Volcano surely isn’t for everyone and
everything, but it’s surprisingly versatile and when things do get big and fast, the Volcano
is a very capable plastic squirter that is definitely going to keep up. And that’s my opinion on the E3D Volcano,
i put a link to the Volcano assortment in the video description. If you like this video please leave a thumbs
up, or a thumbs down if didn’t, but please then also leave a comment about what i can
improve on. And let me know in comments what you think
about the Volcano - is it something that you would even consider using or would you # never
trade resolution and detail reproduction for faster prints? If you want to support my channel, consider
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i get to play with. As always, thanks for watching, and i’ll
see you in the next one.
