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A simple part at the heart of everything.
18 | 09 | 2013
Often everything boils down to a simple thing, upon which a whole assembly rely and needs to work. It's easy to think of our hearth, brain, and organs... in the case of a RepRap I don't know what this one would be, but the hotend is one of the most critical part of our machines.
The real big news is : we finally got our prototypes of the missing part to make the hotends !!!
The small (~20mm) stainless barrel that makes the thermal brake and allow this hotend to be so compact and efficient.
I got the prototypes last Sunday almost warm from our local CNC shop. Ten were made from the available shared blueprint and need a small piece of ptfe as a liner, and three are the same as on the beta Huxley : straight and without plastic -> can be used at much higher temp to extrude nylon, polycarbonate, and other fancy thermoplastics.
I don't know why they abandoned this version. Mine still works and has been ported over time and over several of my machines. Through this one kilometers of filament have passed, giving birth to hundreds of things and almost all of the 30 first Foldaraps.
The same Sunday I finished to assemble an hotend with a straight barrel and could push some filament by hand. On Monday night I made a short print to see how it goes in real conditions. It was nice at first but at a third of the cube the output wasn't constant, then I realized that I forgot to tension the springs at all... after having added a little pressure to correct that during the print, the rest of the cube came perfectly.
It need a little more tries before validating it and ordering them by full batches, but as an hint of my level of optimism (foolishness?) : I'm actually showing the machine with our new head tomorrow in front of 700 people from the Chambers of Commerce and Industry during the afternoon in a panel titled "Other realities, new industrial education" ;-)
The whole event will be live broadcast at http://www.cci.fr/web/2013-universite-des-cci/accueil
If everything works as intended, the first difficulties ("argh the new one-piece-hotend don't work for us") will have turned out in the advantage of having been forced to find someone who can machine this part locally, making us a little more independent.
And we will be able to start what we are all waiting for, workshops and shipping !
Comments
Mathias B
Hace 1 decade
Amazing news, as the wise man said : "what does not kill you makes your foldable 3D printer stronger"
Good luck for tomorrow =) !
Good luck for tomorrow =) !
Louis Martin
Hace 1 decade
voilà des bonnes nouvelles ,pour le CCI relâche ils ne sont que 700 ,bon courage
kourou
kourou
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