My best k8400 upgrade

Hi guys!

I’ve had my Vertex since release and printed probably thousand prints with it. Before that I had the k8200 and printed probably as much. I have tinkered a lot with it and made several modifications, some good, some bad and some useless.

But now I have made the best upgrade ever and I felt the need to tell people about it.
The modification reduce print time by 300%, fuses the layers together a lot better (stronger parts) and creates much nicer surfaces.

What intricate modification might this be you ask? It’s something as simple as replacing the 0.35 nozzle with 0.8.
What? Then you can’t print fine details you may say.

That is true, but in reality, how many sculptures or delicate figures do you actually print? I print 0.
95% of my time I print different cases or parts, none requires 0.35 nozzle and most of them take about 5+ hours to print with the standard nozzle.

I have switched to the e3dv6 extruder which I power from a separate psu to reduce heating time. You can simply use the original heating cartridge if you don’t want to mess with it or risk it the more powerful e3dv6 cartridge.
Switching back to 0.35 nozzle takes me about 1 minute.

But guys, consider swapping nozzle! Right now I’m printing an object that will take 45 min vs 3 hours with the standard nozzle (tested both).

If you’re unsure, you can just test it before making any mods.Simply edit nozzle size in Repetier to 0.8 and slice your object to see the reduction in printing time and how different the part will look, I bet you won’t see any difference!

Hello,
Why not just enlarge an original nozzle hole to 0.8 mm?
What other parameter need to be changed ?
Henri

I guess you could but I also wanted to change to the e3d hot end to be able to quickly swap nozzle. Nozzle clogging is also a lot less frequent with the new hot end. I haven’t changed any other parameters other than the nozzle dimension in Repetier and it works great!