Overheated PEEK isolator on the (POS) Felix 3.0 extruder. All my excuses are gone now; next week I get to finish my upgrade to the E3D Chimera.
What caused the meltdown?
I don’t think it’s designed with printing ABS in mind. I’d say the thermal design of the Felix extruder is deficient, but it doesn’t seem that there was much if any actual thermal engineering done on it.
I’m not familiar with that hot end, looks kind of bad at a glance. Does it have a PTFE liner? I’m guessing the PEEK threads got too weak due to elevated temp to contain melt pool pressure, and simply gave out.
Yep that’s it. No idea on the PTFE liner.
Wow, that design just looks questionable right off the bat. It’s a good thing it can be replaced with something that’s known to work well, though the mount has to be changed. It looks like as if they rejected every other design, including the mount, because it wasn’t invented by them.
The problem with the stock bed is not that the heater is not powerful enough (barely), but that the corrugated aluminum stress relieves over time and deforms. Mine ended up about .03" out of flat after 4 months of use at 105C. I replaced it with a ground flat Aluminum sheet from McMaster.
The extruder cannot be replaced easily. I had to redesign the entire assembly. I started when the first hot end died, and fortunately have printed enough parts to get me going again (crossing fingers).
I bought the Felix because I like the frame design and large print area. I would not recommend the printer because of the extruder and bed design are a failure. Supplying some nicely machined 80/20, inexpensive profile bearings and a couple plastic parts doesn’t really justify the price.
It seems likely that I’m going to end up replacing or rebuilding most all the parts, and then build another one from scratch. :-]