I plan to make a custom heater block for a pair of printers i am building, this is my latest sketch, it is more or less is a mashup of the E3D V6 and the Olsson Block of the Anders Olsson and the Ultimaker 2+.
I find it horribly annoying that you cannot remove the nozzle with only one tool on the V6, so this version adds a screw that goes into a milled slot on the heatsink to stop the block from rotating relative to the heatsink.
Comments?
3D View here: http://a360.co/2c7DtOZ
In the V6, you’re not tightening the nozzle against the hot block, you’re tightening it against the heat break. This is important to getting a good seal in the melt zone. So I’m not sure fixing the hot block to the heatsink will do what you want it to.
@Ryan_Carlyle , as you can see on the picture the nozzle is not tightened flat against the block, so its back is still tightened against the heat break, you just do not have to hold the block with another tool.
It’s probably fine, yeah.
@Erik_Cederberg
I’ve build already some hotends that are using this principle. I’ve tried that with one and with 2 screws. The problem is that the temperature on the heatsink increases significantly and therefor the temperature behind the heatbreak is also higher. Sometimes even too high (for PLA i.e.)
You should at least use a stainless steel screw and everything above M3 is already too thick for PLA
Stainless was the plan, but if you say it might still be a problem i might think about milling a larger slot and put a insulating sleeve around the screw, thin silicone tubing maybe?
Or replacing the fan with a higher powered one to increase the cooling…
The reason it takes two tools is so you don’t snap the thin heat break (which people have done by not using two tools).
Snap it off, or back out the cold zone threads instead of the nozzle. That’s annoying.
That it is so vulnerable to damage when changing nozzles, and that you need two hands and tools to do it is to me one of its greatest design flaws of the E3D
On my Ultimaker2 with a Olsson block i can just use a single small torque wrench and swap nozzles in no time with one hand, and it will not leak and it is also pretty robust and hard to break. This is the user experience i would like to have on the E3D hotend, and this redesigned heater block is one step towards this.
I think a small silicon tube should work. Have never tried that. The main idea behind my heater design was a little bit different. So there was no room for this. And in the end I needed the screws to fix the heater.
I ended up with long screws which are fixed at the top without connection on the other fins.
