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Posts Tagged ‘hotend upgrade’
Hotend Upgrade for MakerBot Replicator 2 3D Printer
25, Jun 2015
Time for testing another upgrade for our MakerBot Replicator 2 3D printer, we found an interesting offer by a company called AVN Swiss on eBay that offers a performance hotend upgrade for the device. It is a kit containing a specially coated nozzle and thermal barrier tube with a very low friction plating called TwinClad XT. According to the manufacturer TwinClad XT is a nickel composite coating designed to be very hard, corrosion resistant, and have good release properties against plastic. It is supposed to offer one of the lowest coefficient of friction, better then nickel with PTFE codeposit and the hardness supposedly makes this coating abrasion resistant. So if you are working with more abrasive filaments like Carbon Fiber, Aluminates, ColarFabb MetalFill etc. this upgrade is supposed to greatly increase the life of your nozzle and thermal tube. Low friction will also prevent clogs in thermal barrier tube, a critical zone where plastic liquidizes.
We have tested numerous different nozzles on our MakerBot Replicator 2 3D printer, including low friction ones with additional coating, but that did not completely resolve the issues we’ve had with filament jams from time to time. After installing the hotend upgrade kit from AVN Swiss however for about a month already we haven’t had a single filament jam. So it seems that while the nozzle is important the thermal barrier tube also takes part in the cause of filament jams and so the result is that this kit does a great job in preventing them. Definitely a good upgrade, however we should warn you that the installation and adjustment of the new thermal tube and nozzle can be quite hard and is not advised for novice users that are not yet familiar with their 3D printer. So we would recommend this upgrade only to advanced users that are familiar with their hardware and will easily manage to remove the old nozzle and thermal barrier tube and replace them with the new ones.
– For more details about the company AVN Swiss and the products they make…