-=( Hotends , Hobbies , New Years Resolutions )=-

-=( Hotends )=-
I have been building and prototyping hotends for a while now, and have built and tested a fairly large number of them in many many different combinations, some have worked great in some respects and some have been complete flops,  early in the peace i did an all metal hotend which functioned well with pla and abs and was capable of producing some reasonable quality prints in abs and slightly less reasonable quality prints in pla.

in the quest for better print quality i added a ptfe liner in the more recent versions and changed the thermal barrier to a much simpler to produce M6 threaded rod with a 4mm bore, which leaves a 0.6mm wall thickness so far this configuration has worked and worked well i've upgraded the heatsink in V5 with thinner fins to make it better at removing heat from the thermal barrier

the result after 5 versions now is a hotend that has extruded every single brand and color of pla both high quality stuff and the worst i can get my hands on, not jam regardless of the speed i run it at , and has done print runs lasting more than 3 days in some cases.

to date in testing the v4 and now the v5 i haven't had a single jam without having to make one by turning the cooling fans off and even then it's kept going for a while

not bad for a $38 hotend if i do say so myself

towards the future i will probably stop producing the 3mm version and concentrate on the 1.75mm version

-=( Hobbies )=-
Since my hobby has become my buisness ( mostly due to a lack of local work and the desire not to be a low paid slave ) i have a new hobby thanks to my father in law ... Photography or more specifically HDR Photography HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and allows you to show up details in a photograph you otherwise just wouldn't get due to underexposing and overexposing in different parts of the image,

depending on how far you take HDR (and a lot of people have gone too far) you can create quite a nice picture out of something that would otherwise look dead and boring if it were taken on a Iphone for example
goto flickr and search for HDR for many many examples.

-=( New Years Resolutions )=-
Normally i don't bother and treat it as a total waste of time, and this year at least 1 has already been broken

one of them is to put more content up here, for two reasons 1, a lot of other 3d printing related blogs have slowed down and people don't seem to be putting as much up, 2, for some reason even with a relatively small amount of content here this blog actually gets more visits than my web-store does i'm going to aim for at least 1 post per week possibly more, depending on how interesting the week has been.
I've got the update the for sale section as well which i might do later today. the Theme might change too kind of getting tired of the old one a bit

-=( AluhotendV5 )=-

Here's a status update on the Aluhotend v4 and v5

the V4 is currently out of stock on heatsinks and those are in longer in production

so we're moving on to the V5 which will consist of two different versions

The first one that will pop up is the V5A which has thinner fins the and the updated nozzle geometry which the latest few of the V4 had, but will still use the round heater block, somtime just after febuary 15th the V5A will become the V5B with a square heater block with a few improvements , 

- there will be two thermistor holes one for 2mm and one 2.5mm thermistors, the 

- the block itself is square  12mm X 12mm X 22mm

after February we'll be doing much bigger production runs than we have in the past and we're going to be talking to people in various countries about carrying these hotends on consignment or partial consignment

-=( BullDog extruder review )=-

-=( Bulldog extruder - review )=-

This is the new bulldog extruder from ReprapDiscount.

-=( first impressions )=-

It's shiney and very well machined and it looks like the kind of extruder you would expect to find in a high end expensive 3d printer , judging by the last week and a half of trouble free non stop extruding with 3mm it's not going to surprise me to see it find its way into many of the existing printers already out there

-=( stepper motor )=-

The stepper motor is a shorter than usual nema17 requiring only 1 amp for full torque which is what most Pololus run at anyway it also runs warm and not burning hot,  the stepper motor drives a small planetary gearbox (black square thing) and delivers enough torque to push 3mm filament flawlessly.

-=( the business end )=-

The hotend mounting point is designed around the jhead mounting groove and clamps the jhead vertically resulting in a very reliable and rigid hotend, due to the clamping action on the top end, so even hotends like the E3d which doesn't have a jhead compatible groove should work as well,

-=( testing )=-
My testing consisted of:
- extruding 4kg of previously written off 3mm pla (written off due the brittleness and age)
- extruding 1kg of previously written off 3mm abs (written off due bad diameter variance)
- currently on a production machine running 1.75mm pla (stopping occasionally due to diameter of filament dropping below 1mm in diameter)

-=( Getting one )=-

keep and eye on www.Reprapdiscount.com and shortly after www.3dindustriesaustralia.com.au