E3D have just released an upgrade to the v5 & v6 HotEnd, the Volcano. I bring it up here because I know a lot of you guys have swapped out the standard HotEnd to use the v6, so this may be of interest, especially to anyone that does long/large prints.
Volcano is a replacement heater block and nozzle which are twice as long as the standard versions. This gives you twice the melt-volume improving your maximum extrude rate allowing you to print thick layers faster, cutting down time on long prints and massively increasing strength.
There are some very interesting behaviours in the slicers with such large layers and thick tracks - we plan on doing a blog post soon detailing our findings.
Please fire-away with any questions you guys have about compatibility, maximum print speeds etc etc…
So, my new Volcano kit (with all 4 nozzle sizes) arrived yesterday.
I recently printed some parts.
Print quality is very good.
No stringing, no blobs, and really smooth layers.
I can now also print some filaments that were problematic to cause jams before.
I could lower the temp about 20°C (now printing at 220 instead of 240) with that problematic PLA,
and can although print with effectively double the speed! (now 60mm, before 30mm)
Really nice!
And i think there is still room for mor speed…
Absolutely worth it’s money!
Only caveat is, that nozzle sizes start at 0.6mm so for finer prints it would be nice to have smaller nozzles as well.
At least 0.4mm would be nice.
Here are some results with the Volcano at 0.6mm nozzle size.
I left all Print settings but teperature and speed unchanged.
Speed is now 60mm/s instead of 30mm/s and temp 220°C instead of 240°C.
