@Steven_Mething One thing is exactly what you say: cutting corners… that affects performance while relying on the positive reputation of the original for sales. It’s anti-consumer behavior. A genuine E3D costs what it does in part because it costs money to make a quality product. That’s what the E3Dv6 label is supposed to signify, a certain level of design and performance. $13.50 is an implausibly low price for something built to E3Dv6 specs.
If it’s an open source product, it should be built to the proper specs (eg polished interior of the heat break) or the new design should be open-sourced as well under a different name. Failure to do that is out of compliance with the OSHW license. (Although that admittedly all really applies to something copyrightable, not pure functional hardware design. Don’t really want to get into that discussion here.)
The other issue is the annoying use of search term buzzwords in the product listing (like J-Head) even though this has no relation to J-Heads. If the seller is calling out entirely different products in the name, it indicates they either don’t know or don’t care that there are differences between J-Heads and E3Dv6s. Many of us have ethical issues with giving folks like that business.
I’m not going to judge people who make different purchasing decisions from what I choose for myself… we’re all in different situations… but I’m glad we have these discussions as a community so people can make informed purchases.
One thing I will say is that I didn’t WANT this hot end. I wanted an actual E3D V6, they were just more money than I could justify for a part on my 3D printer. I did a bunch of research on them and the cheapest I could find was like $75. The rest of my printer is a cheap Chinese knock off, I guess the new hot end is too. If it weren’t for stuff like this, I wouldn’t have a printer.
E3D sell what they call the block and sock option. It’s the heat block, heat element, thermistor and a nozzle with 3 silicon socks for a very reasonable price. You can easily mate that to the cheap Chinese heatsink and throat while getting the benefits of the larger heater block and precision thermistor.
@Farzad_Battiwalla the heatbreak is the most important part of the whole thing. Any big chunk of aluminum tapped M7 will work as a heat sink, and the hot block and nozzle are commodity parts.
@Ryan_Carlyle That’s not necessarily the case. In my experience, the biggest difference in the heat breaks is the finish quality. By this I mean that they aren’t as polished and tend have burrs and cruft through the center. This is easily remedied with a drill bit or thin de-burring tool and some elbow grease.
What I have found to be more important is the heat block and thermistor. The e3D heat block is larger than the cheap Chinese ones and the new thermistors being cartridge-based make much better contact. Combined this gives a lot more temperature stability over the stock Chinese setup. Additionally the threading in the heatblock is far better leading to better alignment and seal between the nozzle and heat break.
I will say that if you can afford the whole e3D kit, go for it. All up, it’s less fuss out of the box and just works. If you can’t, the block and sock kit, which combined with the Chinese heat sink and heat break can make for a hot end that works just as well for a lot less, but does require a little more effort to assemble.
@Farzad_Battiwalla this was basically my thought process. If it sucks, just get a new heat break. I didn’t even use the heating element, thermistor, heating block or fan from the Chinese hot end. I just used all the stock stuff from my printer because it was already wired up. Basically I just bought the heatsink and heatbreak. The nozzels were just a bonus.
@Ryan_Carlyle I am interested to hear more about your book, and I have to say that as a long time owner of an eReader, I much prefer dead-tree’s books.