DrillAndFile DIY Hot End

thingiverse

Making your own hotend is like baking your own bread - there might be professionals out there who can bake better and have superior gadgets to do so, but nothing compares to your own, self-made bread. This hotend is just another attempt at designing a simple hotend which can be made DIY-style without the need for expensive tools, machinery and materials. It was inspired by the http://reprap.org/Watson_Hot_End, the http://reprap.org/KISS_Hot_End and the http://reprap.org/Wildseyed_Simple_Hot_End The current version is v3 and works quite well. Besides printing calibration pieces and robotics parts, I have used it to print all parts for my custom Mendel90. In the gallery are some examples of prints made with v2 and v3 with a 0.5mm nozzle. The basic idea is to drill first, then file in shape. That is, you take a rectangular block of aluminium alloy, drill the holes for the ptfe sleeve and the nozzle first, and then start filing the block into its final shape. That way, the drilling precision that can be reached with a simple drill press is not critical, you can more or less drill slightly off-center and still end up with a very precise hotend after filing. The heater block is drill/cut/file, the bracket is drill/cut and the insulator is drill/cut only. There is no lathe or milling required, neither for the heater block nor for the insulator. The M4 thread in the heater block (for attaching to the bracket) can easily be tapered by hand. The materials are cheap, a single hotend costs probably no more than 5 EUR as far as material is concerned. However, to source the material, you probably need to buy slightly larger quantities (for example, you cannot buy a 20x35x12mm piece of aluminum alloy, you need to buy 20cm of 20x35mm bar at ebay for approx. 5 EUR - which you can use to build more than 15 heater blocks). I have bought material for approx. 30-40 EUR and now have enough in stock to build at least 10 hotends, that is, 6 more to go. The detailed documentation for the hot end is available at http://reprap.org/wiki/DrillandFile_Hot_End Instructions See the main documentation page http://reprap.org/wiki/DrillandFile_Hot_End > v3 Build Description for a step-by-step description of the build process.