Hemera retraction settings upgrade#

However, at temperatures above 250C, the PTFE tube can break down, so they also make heat breaks out of only metal. The normal heat break has PTFE inside which keeps the filament on track even if it gets a little soft. Hot End after Tightening heat break is no longer visible Ideally, the filament melts just before it leaves the heat break and enters the nozzle. The far end of the heat break butts up against the nozzle inside the heat block which is a metal block that holds the heating element and the thermistor. This tube tries to isolate the hot part of the hot end from the filament that is heading towards the nozzle. Then it travels through a little tube called a heat break or a throat. If you haven’t taken a hot end apart before, the general flow is that plastic enters into a heat sink. Time to call it a day, right? Of course, not. It was great! Easy to load, rarely jammed and any clogs were simple to fix.

Once that worked, I redesigned the mount, put on a clone Titan extruder, and fed it with a Bowden tube. I printed a mount and got that working great. Like the extrusions, they’ve been in storage for a few years.

I knew for a long time I wanted to put something better in place and I had a few knock-off E3D V6 hot ends sitting around. However, the thing was a pain to load and with the cooling not so great on the heat break, jams were reasonably common, if not as common as you might expect. I’d already moved the fan for access, something most people with A8s do. A fan totally covers the extruder and the heat break screws right into the bottom, followed by the heat block and the nozzle. The extruder is a NEMA17 stepper in a U-shaped metal frame with a conventional extruder bolted to it. I had made some very simple changes to the extruder, but it was mostly stock and that was a pain. The extruder on the A8 - actually, the entire X assembly - doesn’t really change on the AM8 build. Having a solid metal frame on the printer really turned it into a world-class printer. Looking for a pandemic project, I decided it was time to take the plunge and the results were great. I merrily improved the printer quite a bit over a relatively short period of time and I also bought a bunch of aluminum extrusion to rebuild the frame to the AM8 plans you can find on Thingiverse.Īn AM8 is Born The All Metal Hotend in Action Finally!īut life happens, and that box of extrusions sat on the shelf for a few years. But it is a fun printer because you really need to do some work on it to brace the acrylic frame and fix other shortcomings. If you’ve ever thought about moving from a traditional hot end to an all-metal hot end, you might want to hear me out and maybe I can save you some trouble.Ī few years ago, I picked up an Anet A8 for a really low price.

Hemera retraction settings upgrade#

This is the story of an upgrade gone bad, although the ending is happy enough. If you are reading Hackaday, you probably know how that is. What I do enjoy is building, fixing and even more importantly improving the printers themselves. But Patrick correctly realized that I don’t actually enjoy printing things that I need. That may sound odd, because I built a printer back in 2012 and since then I’ve built a lot of printers and I currently have at least three in my lab. My son, Patrick, has observed on more than one occasion that I do not like 3D printing.