nosrep's ender 3 printhead

I made some duct modifications and now cooling seems to be much better. I think the new duct is choking the airflow a bit too much, but it’s more focused and can actually reach the spot right under the nozzle (which the old one seemed to struggle with?).

I also did a LOT of testing, didn’t track most of it. Probably could benefit from a little more tuning, but we can do the pin support sphere on fullcontrol.xyz now!

fixed some of the lingering issues, like the bltouch interfering with the duct and the bltouch interfering with the endstop (it’s always the bltouch…). we should be done now

it has been built! it is so loud!

I finished designing the ducting and finished printing out everything, immediately a couple problems: ducts bump into bltouch (this was also in the cad but i didn’t notice) and the ducts are really flimsy. The ducts themselves are fine but the front plate is too thin to keep it in place properly. They work but it’s kinda sketchy. To fix the bltouch thing I just melted the ducts with my soldering iron, already remodeled a fixed version but have yet to print.

The extruder seems to be not tuned very well. I set the manufacturer-recommended esteps, but it could be off. The cooling also seems to be sketchy? I can feel an insane amount of airflow but i don’t know if it’s going to the part yet. It aims a little low and I reprinted a bridging test I made earlier and the results seem to be worse.

I also need to do some fixes later if i want to use this long-term. I couldn’t make a new extruder cable because my crimping tool couldn’t handle jst-ph, so i’m gonna have to deal with the stock extruder cable which severely limits the amount of vertical travel I can handle.

i think i finally finished the ducts…
these were nightmarish to make. onshape conveniently doesn’t have 3d sketches, so I did a horribly janky system involving planes and a routing curve. The path the duct had to take ended up being kinda strange, so the loft would constantly crash out because the profiles turned too sharply. i did eventually get the loft to cooperate, and the duct looks okay? it’s still very lumpy, but it should transition relatively smoothly, which is what’s important for airflow.
i’ve also started printing the parts now. as i’m typing this, the main mount is finished and the fan mount is almost done. after that i should theoretically be good to assemble once i print the ducts

(this is the video i used for duct design principles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YijwkQCOBEA)

made ducting setup and fine tuned fan mounts
actual duct geometry still gonna need a lot of work and maybe prototypes though

got the bltouch probing after much pain and suffering. needed to make new wires for this, duponts crimped okay but the crimper i borrowed was too wide to crimp the jst-xh properly. did it horribly and it seems sturdyish for now but it is incredibly sketchy and probably a fire hazard (i would be more worried if the bltouch drew more current). the plan was originally to remake the extruder wire, but after this i’m probably gonna have to hold off until i can get a proper crimper

reverted bltouch position. blower on the side looked too dumb so they’re both going on the front now. Blower mount still needs some refinement but should be basically done, then need ducts

switched out the bltouch mount position for the blower. struggled with making sane supports, still need to fix that

did some heat break testing. wanted to see if the casing of the hotend would get hot so i wired up the thermistor+heating element onto the board. waited a few minutes with a cheap fan i had pointed at the heat sink and it didn’t seem to get very hot so that’s a win for the future 3d printed mount. also i soldered the header to and wired up the accelerometer

mounted the bltouch. it kinda occludes the hotend fan but there shouuulllldd be enough space to not choke it up too bad, assuming it’s not total garbage (doubtful)

tried to find a good part cooling fan position too and they’re all strange looking

got models for bltouch and 5015 fans
surprisingly annoying, neither have official models and one model i found online for the bltouch was weird (holes that were supposed to be 18mm were like 17.998mm) and so i immediately gave up and made my own.
it looks really bad but it should be usable dimensionally

tried a bunch of alternatives for the 5015 fan. tried an alternative manufacturer but it differed too much from the other two community models (which were extremely similar to each other), so i just picked the more popular one.
Couldn’t really model this one myself because I don’t have calipers to measure the dimensions and don’t have the fans yet to begin with

did more work on the mount (accidentally forgot to start recording so there’s like an hour of work not listed here)
the extruder part is done. there’s still some weirdness in the cad that I should probably clean but i’m also really lazy
still need to make part for part cooling fans and bltouch
timelapse: https://lapse.hackclub.com/timelapse/ZeQnBYR1oswD

biqu/bigtreetech does not have cad models for the extruder, but someone on printables made a very accurate one that i’m pulling for measurements. Confirmed it with the drawings that were in the “manual” for the h2 v2s