Glow Plug Turned Metal-Capable 3D Printer Hotend

At this point, most readers will be familiar with fused deposition modeling (FDM) 3D printers, and how a plastic filament is pushed through a heater and deposited as liquid through a nozzle. Most o…

CPU Cooler In A Printer’s Hot End

[Proper Printing] often does unusual 3D printer mods. This time, he’s taking a CPU cooler made for a Raspberry Pi with some heat pipes and converting it into a 3D printer hot end. Sound crazy…

Looking Inside A 3D Printer Nozzle With Computed Tomography

Have you ever wondered what’s actually going on inside the hotend of your 3D printer? It doesn’t seem like much of a mystery — the filament gets melty, it gets squeezed out by the…

Objective Hotend Performance Measurement Is Hard

Evaluating the performance of 3D printers and component upgrades is a more difficult than it may seem at first glance, and subjective observations can lead to incorrect conclusions. To objectively …

Automated Hotend Swapping For Less Wasteful Multicolor Printing

Multicolor printing on FDM machines can be tricky to get working flawlessly, and purging hotends when changing colors can end up wasting a lot of filament and material. To solve this problem for th…

Maximum Throughput Benchie

Have you ever needed to make a few hundred of something quickly? [Roetz 4.0] has got you covered with his massively parallel entry into the SpeedBoatRace competition. The idea behind the SpeedBoatR…

DIY High Flow 3D Printing Nozzle

Sometimes advances happen when someone realizes that a common sense approach isn’t the optimal one. Take radio. Success in radio requires bigger antennas and more power, right? But cell phone…

Spinning Threads Put The Bite On Filament In This Novel Extruder Design

When it comes to innovation in FDM 3D printing, there doesn’t seem to be much room left to move the needle. Pretty much everything about filament printing has been reduced to practice, with m…

Fail Of The Week: The Metal Hot End Upgrade

My son, Patrick, has observed on more than one occasion that I do not like 3D printing. That may sound odd, because I built a printer back in 2012 and since then I’ve built a lot of printers …