Mosquito vs water cooling
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Does the mosquito hotend have a substantial advantage over a water cooled Chimera setup?
The two big things for the Mosquito seem to be reduction of heat creep and ability for a single handed nozzle change. I seem to have no issue with nozzle change which only leaves heat creep.
Compared to a water cooler, does the Mosquito offer better heat creep protection or are they about the same ?I am trying to figure out if heat creep is causing my Chimera setup to have poor filament feed. With petg and using a single active extruder, I can print until the cows come home with no issue. If however I introduce a second material/extruder and the petg extruder sits for a while (even if standby temp is reduced to 150C from 240C for print temp) while the other extruder is used, there seems to be an issue during extruder path switchover with petg not flowing nicely and even the occasional clog. It seems that once the old material has been extruded, flow returns to normal. I am using Volcano hot ends.
I still need to try improved air flow over the heatsink and possibly a titanium heat break. -
@jens55 I cannot speak to the mosquitos, but I run a Titan aqua setup. The biggest advantage of liquid cooling is the ability to run your extruder in heated build chamber. Blowing 70C air on the heat break isn’t nearly as effective as circulating 26C water. But if you have room temp air blowing over the hot end or water, it likely would be the similar in efficiency.
Hope that helps a bit.
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For the time being, this printer is only used at room temperature but the long term goal is to enclose it.
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I have a single watercooled v6 heat break that I got from a guy in Germany on mine. I like it as even with doing a 20 hour print the radiator fan never runs so the printer is virtually quiet other than the stepper motor noise. I also have a berd air style part cooling which gets rid of all of the fans other than the ones inside the base of the machine. I can say anything about the mosquito, but I personally like the water cooling
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I hav one roll of petg. I won't name the brand because one roll might just be a bad roll. But it seems like it has a TG that is lower than most PLA. It has looked like heat creep twice only when printing it really slow . But what makes me think it is just bad filament is trying to remove my purge line from the heat bed after it cooled to 65c the 2in. Purge line stretched and was over 10in long after removing it..
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@jens55 Interesting that this has come up. I'm currently working on an experimental 6 input mixing hot end which uses 6 Mosquito heat breaks (see my blog). The heat breaks are very efficient due to the extremely thin wall tubes. Because the heat breaks are not structural elements, the tubes can be very much thinner than conventional heat breaks. I believe the cross sectional area of the Mosquito heat breaks is about 15% of an E3D V6, so very little heat finds its way past the heat break.
This works well when filament is moving forward, as in a conventional single input, hot end. BUT, (and it's a big BUT), when filament is static, as in a multi input hot end, heat can be conducted up through the filament itself. In this situation, it doesn't matter how efficient a heat break is because the filament itself bridges the that heat break.
I have more testing to do, but I'm beginning to come to the conclusion that the only way to prevent heat breaks from blocking when the filament is static for a long time, is to use PTFE lined heat breaks. Of course, this will limit temperatures and thus filament types.
It is possible that a water cooled solution might provide a steep enough temperature gradient to prevent blockage in the heat break, but I wouldn't want to put money on it. -
Ian, I'm using a water cooling system with a custom hotend using this:
and I have no trouble at all by leaving the filament heated.
So, I think it would worth the effort to adapt a water cooling system on the Mosquito. It can be very simple: mine is made out of an aluminium bloc, cut, drilled and taped by hand (I don't have all your nice tools
).With your setup, a large copper bloc with 6 precise holes for the heatbreaks (so there is a good thermal conduction), and 2 taped holes for the water can do the trick.
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@fma Thanks. But I'm not sure how that helps. I have 6 inputs which currently take 6 Mosquito heat breaks. These then feed filament into a "combining block", with a single output and then through a mixing chamber and finally, exiting through a single nozzle. So a water cooling solution would need 6 filament inputs (which can be bowden clips) and 6 outputs. But how do I connect 6 outputs of a cooling block to 6 inputs of a combining block with heat breaks in between? The only way I can think of is to use compression fittings and tubes with nuts and olives at each end, but that makes the entire hot end very big and heavy because the tubes have to be spaced far enough apart to accommodate the compression fittings.
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Design a part that uses internal coolant paths and contact Renishaw AM group in UK. They can print your design in your choice of materials. Their prices are reasonable.
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Ian, the idea is to make a simple bloc with 6 vertical holes and have the 6 heatbreak tubes go through (they need to be precisley drilled to have a good thermal contact). Then, you make horizontal holes (between the heatbreak holes), to make a path for the water. These holes can be through the entire bloc, and using external tubes to make the links.
Looking at your pictures, this would require to remove the heatsink on the heatbreak tubes; don't know if it is possible...
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@fma The tubes need to be water tight where they pass through the water filled cold block. Yet at the same time, I need to screw them into the hot block. So they need be able to rotate in that water filled chamber as they get screwed into the hot block, yet somehow that needs to be a water tight joint. The Mosquito tubes themselves have very thin walls and are easily damaged (I know from experience). I have no idea how Slice Engineering manage to fit those copper heat sinks onto those very thin wall tubes. They must be a press fit with some sort of mandrel or internal support to the tubes to prevent them buckling. They probably heat the copper parts too. Or maybe they use some sort of secret adhesive. Either way, I have no idea how I could remove the copper parts so using the Mosquito heat breaks would be out of the question. But I still have no idea how I could join a 6 input cold block to 6 input hot block with short heat breaks sections between the two.
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My solution is a mix of mosquito style and water cooling. I used a silicon tube (like Marc Peltier) to circulate water around the heat-brake. See the post here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/deltabot/n3PImRPtmOo/i8WCxQ1kBgAJ
I punctured the silicon tube with a smaller (than the heat-brake) dimeter steel tube. I also noticed that I had to put another peace of tube under the one I was puncturing. Puncturing against a hard surface did not produce watertight holes. I used the same tubes for the standoffs.
I have been running the setup for months now with no leaks.
Maybe you could use a single tube too cool several heat-brakes?
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The holes for the heatbreaks and the holes for the water are distinct, so no problems with water tight stuff.
The water does not need to touch the heatbreaks; it only need to cool down the aluminium (or, better, the copper) bloc, which in turn turns the heatbreaks, and drain heat from them.
This is my setup, with a stainless steel heatbreak, which does not have as good thermal transfert as copper tubes, so it should work much better in this later case.
If it is not possible to remove the heasinks, you need to make your own heatbreaks, without heatsink. This way, you can make them thicker, with print for a key in order to be able to screw them on your block.
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@fšk said in Mosquito vs water cooling:
My solution is a mix of mosquito style and water cooling. I used a silicon tube (like Marc Peltier) to circulate water around the heat-brake. See the post here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/deltabot/n3PImRPtmOo/i8WCxQ1kBgAJ
I punctured the silicon tube with a smaller (than the heat-brake) dimeter steel tube. I also noticed that I had to put another peace of tube under the one I was puncturing. Puncturing against a hard surface did not produce watertight holes. I used the same tubes for the standoffs.
That's the Zatsit solution. I'm still waiting for it (I only ordered the water cooling tube/puncher)...
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@fma Ahh, I see now what you mean. I'll have to give that some thought.....
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@deckingman in your case you could cool down your stagnant hot ends when not in use. It will add time to your print as you would need to re heat your tools before you can use them but that might be more desirable than failed prints.
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@baird1fa said in Mosquito vs water cooling:
@deckingman in your case you could cool down your stagnant hot ends when not in use. ..................
No I can't. It's a mixing hot end - 6 inputs, single output. So only 1 heater.
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Well that certainly blew up while I was sleeping .... some VERY interesting stuff though.
deckingman, I read through your last two blog entries and saw that my issues are not that uncommon and that doing a 6 input hotend would literally drive me insane! Kudos to you for sticking with it, I wouldn't have the patience!
There is a lot of stuff here to digest - thank you all for posting your thoughts! -
@jens55 said in Mosquito vs water cooling:
Does the mosquito hotend have a substantial advantage over a water cooled Chimera setup?
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mosquito creators mentioned they have a watercooling block for mosquito already designed (it's not on the shop but you can possibly order it from them)
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you are comparing 2 head vs 1 head hotend.
Water-cooled chimera should IMHO have better heat creep performance than air-cooled mosquito but really, the question is what you want to achieve? Do you want to upgrade - why? What problem you are trying to solve? Do you want a "new extruder for new printer" so you are deciding to get new mosquito or new chimera? Do you need dual output? etc etc... What materials do you want to print? Enclosed or not? ABS and "hotter" (HIPS, ASA, PETG, PA ...) you can print with mosquito without any cooling (fan of course helps), so, not even a fan on the original heatsink required, if you are not in a heated chamber... If you have heated chamber any water-cooled solution is better than air-cooled solution as there's no effective cooling in the heated chamber using "local" air, and bringing "outside" air complicates things way more than introducing water.
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@arhi said in Mosquito vs water cooling:
@jens55 said in Mosquito vs water cooling:
Does the mosquito hotend have a substantial advantage over a water cooled Chimera setup?
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mosquito creators mentioned they have a watercooling block for mosquito already designed (it's not on the shop but you can possibly order it from them)
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you are comparing 2 head vs 1 head hotend.
Water-cooled chimera should IMHO have better heat creep performance than air-cooled mosquito but really, the question is what you want to achieve? Do you want to upgrade - why? What problem you are trying to solve? Do you want a "new extruder for new printer" so you are deciding to get new mosquito or new chimera? Do you need dual output? etc etc... What materials do you want to print? Enclosed or not? ABS and "hotter" (HIPS, ASA, PETG, PA ...) you can print with mosquito without any cooling (fan of course helps), so, not even a fan on the original heatsink required, if you are not in a heated chamber... If you have heated chamber any water-cooled solution is better than air-cooled solution as there's no effective cooling in the heated chamber using "local" air, and bringing "outside" air complicates things way more than introducing water.
As mentioned in the original post, I seem to have a heat creep issue when printing two materials. I am printing PLA on one extruder and PETG on the second extruder. This is a chimera (clone) setup with two Volcano (clone) heat blocks. I can print either PLA or PETG but if I print a model with both materials then I have feeding issues when the extruder is switched ie after one extruder has set dormant for a bit.
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