Working on a mod to make all metal hotends feed PLA as easily as

3D Printing
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Working on a mod to make all metal hotends feed PLA as easily as teflon lined. Not quite ready for prime time yet. Any manufacturers out there interested when it is?

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Any more detail other than “I have an idea, anyone want to buy it?”

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I think E3D already does this… seeing as how I’ve never had a PLA feed issue with the v6 that wasn’t my fault… and if I’m wrong then I’m sure they’d be interested in what you’ve got.
If E3D doesn’t bite, then there’s Prometheus, Micro Swiss, and the list goes on…

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My E3D hotends work a treat although I do need to replace the heat break on one of them (My fault entirely).

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What problem are you trying to solve?
There’s already, like, 150,000-250,000 all-metal hot ends “in the wild” that feed PLA reliably. The two dominant ones are the E3Dv6 and the Makerbot mk7 (Replicator 2, NOT R2x or 5th gen). Micro Swiss is based on the mk7 geometry with some improvements, and there are many others that I don’t personally have any experience with (Prometheus, Merlin, Polystroooder, DeltaPrintr, etc).

All-metal hot ends that jam with PLA have either design or manufacturing problems. It is fairly well understood at this point what you need to do to prevent jamming. It just tends to be expensive.

If you give us more of an idea what you’re working on, we might be more helpful. Don’t worry about people here stealing your idea, China will knock off any successful product no matter what you do, so secrecy is kind of pointless unless you intend to patent.

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Right, to clarify: this will be open source. My small company is testing molbdenum disulfide based solid film lubricants for hotends as part of a dual independent x build (which will also be open source). Incidentally, it should improve feed of high temperature filaments but only testing will tell.

Also, I like E3D’s V6 and don’t intend to come out with my own hotends, hence the early reach out. I imagine E3D, Printrbot, Lulzbot, et al stay current in this group. (Though I am new here, machine design and automation are my bread and butter…not a brag, just background)

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Thanks for the replies - this seems like a good group.

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Pure, unfiltered, technical feedback. No bs.

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@LatheBuilder the Polystroooder tri hot end has a MoS2 coating in the (titanium?) heat break. I haven’t used it but they say it works well for PLA. That’s not (yet?) a mainstream approach in any case. E3D uses a high-polish internal finish. Makerbot mk7 used an internal diameter step to improve cold-zone filament cooling and act as a meniscus barrier so molten filament doesn’t get to the cold zone (and Stratasys had some pending patent applications around this concept last time I checked). P3D and Micro Swiss use anti-stick coatings from the injection molding industry.

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@raykholo Just what I like. Thanks Ray.

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@Ryan_Carlyle Thanks Ryan