Community water cooling
The water cooling for the DICE was very well received. The DICE was, for example, featured on hackaday.io as "sexiest Tiny Metal Core-XY 3D Printer", Thomas Sanladerer wants to build one and various "big player" from the 3d-printing scene have contacted me and we are going to make some very interesting things in the future. You should be curious!
Why is the feedback so great? Probably because, let me quote: "it's the first good-looking cooling solution I saw in a long time".
Even so good-looking that, e.g. Vincent from www.the-sparklab.de joins the hypetrain ( https://www.facebook.com/thesparklab ) or even E3D-online is going to release something very similar, just a bit more designed for the general market (But I can't say more, that would be telling)
In the meantime, I would like to do something for the community again. So I started a thread in the reprap.org-Forum ( link ), to tinker together over a cost-effective and generally implementable water cooling for hotends. I did two very different suggestions, so that one can build on something.
On the one hand according to a similar principle as the cooling from the DICE:
On the other hand a method, already shown on thingiverse by Juha Koljonen ( link / http://jkoljo.kapsi.fi), utilizing the watercooling from modelling motors:
Unfortunately the resonance was rather restrained (read on here: link ), and I had to do it all alone in the end.
I stuck with the modelling watercooling because of it's cheapness and ease to implement
The printed prototype worked well, so I wrote to various manufacturers in China and after many price comparisons ordered a sample order of 10 pcs. The other part is called "cooling jacket" and can be bought at gearbest or aliexpress for 5€.
The parts are made of standard aluminum and then anodized and thus corrosion-protected. For testing I have asked for glossy and matte anodization. The 11 pieces did cost a total of 212 €, with the largest share being shipping costs and import taxes. I am always enthusiastic about how cheaply you can get professionally produced parts, if one directly manufacturers in China.
The construction is watertight and I will now make a few testprints with these water-cooled printheads. If someone is interested to test and perhaps make suggestions for improvement, too, he can contact me directly, I gladly give the parts against a contribution of my incurred expenses (21€).
Tags: E3D-V6, Hotend, Aluminium, watercooling
