Does anyone want a Nozzle with a smaller diameter?

[furicks]

I've been working on a replacement nozzle and Aluminum for my 2X to see if I can solve any of the heat soak issues that have been popping up and I started thinking about the .4mm diameter nozzle. 

Has anyone used smaller diameters? I have a set of super tiny carbide drill bits that are accurate down to .05mm

Is this an upgrade that anyone would be interested in? It would be especially useful if you are trying to print things with very thing walls as the minimum wall thickness I've ever achieved with my .4mm nozzle is around .5mm.

[JohnA.]

Tons of people have tried.   I've got everything from .2 -> .6 for various printers at home. 

Below .35 it seemed like diminishing returns, and the time of prints skyrockets in my experience.  I'm sure jetguy or someone else will weigh in with facts, but we've been down this path before. 

JohnA.

[Jetguy]

Dude, you kinda missed the boat there.

Smaller nozzles have existed for QUITE some time.

Makergear has always sold 0.35mm nozzle and even some experimental 0.25 nozzles but they were female threaded not male. 5 Minutes with a matching M6 threaded tube turn them into males and screw right in.

Then QU-BD has been selling smaller nozzles for about as long as they have been selling MK7 extruders and parts. http://store.qu-bd.com/category.php?id_category=21

 

I doubt you are going to beat their pricing.

 

All I'm saying is, this has been around and obviously never took off. If it worked that well, there would be more reports of people switching since it's only $5 from QU-BD.

 

On Tuesday, July 9, 2013 4:04:55 PM UTC-4, furicks wrote:

[Jetguy]

I'm not saying don't experiment, but the drill bit alone cost you more than $5.

If you make even one nozzle from it without it breaking you are doing well.

 

I'm not doubting your skills, just saying that in the several years of this hobby, I know better that even I cannot make a better nozzle. I can make a different one for sure, but it's garanteed to not work as well as mass produced ones resulting in huge wastes of my time and money.

 

With my Rostock MAX project, Modded 3 stock nozzles probably 20-30 times over the course of a weekend and ended up throwing in the towel and using a stock MakerBot 0.40 nozzle that outperformed all those other ones.

 

So again, feel free to try and maybe you make the greatest nozzle that has ever been conceived (anything is possible), but it's cheaper and quicker if you really think you can get better resolution to try one of those dirt cheap QU-BD ones first.

[CornGolem]

I'm interested, who else sells small nozzles for Makerbots ?

[furicks]

I wonder if it would be possible to change the barrier tube on the 2X since it wouldn't support any of these screw in type nozzles. 

[66tbird]

Ebay has 0.4 -0.35 -0.25 -0.20 for under $4 each. I've never had an issue with them.

[Jetguy]

Well, you are correct in thinking the barrier tube is the issue (well at least part of it in combination with the mounting bar).

The point is, the heater block is M6 metric thread all the way through. It's trivial to find M6 threaded tubes, all kinds of folks make them. But, you don't want to thread the nozzle onto that because that's the hole point, the thermal barrier is supposed to NOT conduct heat. So you want something that is M6 and conducts heat well, and Makergear sells the brass tubes just like the brass nozzles. So as I said, all you need is a short brass tube, to make the heater block male M6 instead of female M6.

It's really not a big deal but there are enough male MK7 nozzle clones out there of various sizes to make it moot.

 

Also, think about this. Smaller nozzles only work well with PLA due to ABS acting like peanut butter so you are at odds here.

If people have trouble on a 2X with a 0.4 nozzle, expect to have a crapload more problems with a smaller nozzle.

 

Or, maybe I'm wrong and it works great.

 

Best of luck.

[Steven Furick]

hahaha "hole point" no pun intended I'm sure :)

I'm really hoping for an entire stainless steel construction for my barrier tube / nozzle so I can print in FDA approved Nylon when it's released. 

That's primarily why I've been crafting my own on my lathe. 

When you say heater block I'm not sure which part you mean. 

On my 2x there is a silver tube (barrier tube) attached permanently to a brass .4mm nozzle (not threaded not removable). 

That assembly travels through a ceramic block with a heater canister in it (heater block?). 

The top of the barrier tube is pressure fit into an aluminum block which is screwed onto a heat sync / fan assembly. 

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[Carl]

Steven... Do you have photos? I would love to see the 2X extruder stripped down to that point! :-)

[Jake]

"On my 2x there is a silver tube (barrier tube) attached permanently to a brass .4mm nozzle (not threaded not removable).
That assembly travels through a ceramic block with a heater canister in it (heater block?). "

Not sure that's correct. I have replaced a nozzle on my 2X, which was irrepariably clogged. Both the nozzle and the tube are threaded into the aluminum heater block. It takes some care to disassemble this, as the brass tube was torqued into the aluminum block at the factory and is not intended to be removed. There is no good place to grip the aluminum block because it is encased in a ceramic housing. The ceramic is just a shell around the aluminum block. I used a 1/4" rod thru the heater hole to hold the aluminum block in place, since you can't put pliers on the aluminum block directly due to the ceramic shell.

[Steven Furick]

Excellent I see where I was confused. What is the silver tube that is attached to the large silver heat sync block? Is that part of the assembly that you had to replace? 

[Jake]

On Jul 11, 2013, at 2:29 PM, Steven Furick <ste...@furick.com> wrote:

Excellent I see where I was confused. What is the silver tube that is attached to the large silver heat sync block? Is that part of the assembly that you had to replace?

The barrier tube, in my case, did not need to be replaced. I was able to clean it out. I just replaced the brass nozzle, which was clogged. The aluminum heater block has a threaded hole that both the nozzle (from the bottom) and the barrier tube (from the top) threads into. It's critical that these be threaded tight against each other, otherwise you could have leakage or other problems. I tightened the brass nozzle into the aluminum block first, then tightened the barrier the down until tight. My nozzle was a 0.4 from QUBD and seems to work fine.

also tightening these when heated is critical to make sure they don't come loose. This is difficult to do. You can easily burn yourself or have other issues while attempting this.

Also you need the right tools. I can't recall but a something between a 4mm and 5.5mm open ended wrench if I recall. I didn't have a set of small open ended metric wrenches, so I had to buy them. The barrier tube has a flat spot for the purpose of getting a wrench on it.

I did not take off the thermocouple, so doing this all while hanging from a delicate thermocouple wire is also kind of scary, and requires some skill and care.

Anyway, all of this is NOT recommended unless you really know what your doing. I did I cause I had no choice. MBI does not design this to be serviceable, which I disagree with. I think nozzles are consumable, and impact-assembling the components at the factory makes it real hard to replace them.

I do have a question for the longer-standing, wiser members of the community. The old extruders used to come with anti-seize compound for the threads of the nozzle, etc. MBI doesn't seem to use that on the 2X extruder since its not intended to be taken apart... But if we are going to service these things ourselves in the future, should we be using anti-seize?

Do not try this at home.

[Jetguy]

Anti seize is not a bad idea, but generally has not been required in the past. In fact, I think it was more of a thermal compound in the old MK6 days than a requirement.

One theory is that a machinist provided those original heater blocks. Those folks are generally "by the rules" kind of folks and anti-sieze is used on anything an everything as good practice. I myself never followed that part of the directions after my first MK5 simply because when it baked off at 230C, it didn't seem needed and I never had problems.

With more modern MK7 extruders, the aluminum block, brass nozzle, and stainless thermal barrier all meet together inside the aluminum threads, but I've never seen a problem there either and have taken them apart more times than I care to remember.

 

Is it "required"? I say probably not, although brass into aluminum it's not a bad idea.

 

More likely, they are just bottoming the nozzle into the block, then screwing the thermal barrier in from the top in an assembly line fashion. They likely found that screwing the therm barrier into the top may unscrew the nozzle if it wasn't insanely tight.

 

So this is more of an assembly line thing than any purposeful reason based on performance. They have this tray of hot ends facing up and one person torque in nozzles with a screw gun set to some insane torque setting just below the "snap off" point of the nozzle. The tray or jig hold the ceramic in a way it doesn't crack. Then the whole thing gets flipped over and another person cranks in the thermal barrier tubes. Being the nozzle is jammed in, then thermal barrier then seals tightly. Not the worst thing in the world, but certainly a "your screwed if you need to take it apart situation".

 

You don't have a jig to hold the heaterblock and ceramic and ideally, heating the block would make the aluminum expand more than the brass and less torque would be required to unseat the nozzle.