Hotends.com
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Anyone got experience of these? Are they the same person who put a lengthy explanation on the reprap forum as to why they were stopping trading the original J hotends due to cloners?
Not trying to start a tyre fire here I am just curious and will need another hotend in the next couple of months.
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I don't know about all that, but I did meet the man behind it at MRRF and got a look at what they have. I came away impressed.
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@Phaedrux thanks. I don't think it has anything to do with the post was thining about. It looks like their marketing maerial needs to be read very carefully...
https://reprap.org/forum/read.php?1,842289,842807#msg-842807
That particular hotend appears to have died a death.
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Found it. Does appear to be the same person. Thought the post was a lot longer in memory! Maybe there's another...
https://reprap.org/forum/read.php?305,565089,618149#msg-618149
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@DocTrucker I’ve been using J-Heads from hotends.com for years, generally very happy with them. They got a bad reputation for a while because of shoddy clones, I remember the post you’re talking about. I understand that if you contact him, he’s happy to make them to order.
Ian
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Yeah he is still trading via ebay.
I think I was muddling it a bit in my mind with the much more thorough post regarding RepRapPro.
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There's not masses of information online regarding their performance, but I understand the struggles of a low man count business!
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@DocTrucker to be fair, I’ve only used the older Mk IV and V J-heads in 3mm and 1.7mm, no idea how the newer versions perform.
Ian
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I've used old-school J-heads. They worked, ok, I guess. They mocked the design of the E3D v5/v6, then it seems they have copied most of the E3D features for their new version.
That post you mention was definitely them. Very off-putting.
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Found this on the hotends.com/press-kit website
Hotends.com was founded in 2011 with the principal mission to create a better more elegant hotend called the J-Head
. Since then the J-Head has gone through many different revisions working to attain a solid working, fast printing, low part count, premium hotend.
In 2018 Hotends LLC founded by Nicholas Stratton was formed to assume ownership of hotends.com. Hotends LLC has a renewed focus on innovation while maintaining a high quality product, setting industry standards and to support the 3D community.The original owner was Brian Reifsnyder, of Reifsnyder Precision Works, who developed the J-head, and it was him I always dealt with. I felt Brian was a proper development engineer (just look at this page!), who moved the area of nozzle design forward in the early days of RepRap (see his statement about opening hotends.com in Oct 2011). The 'Genuine' J-head was a solid design (if complex to machine) that worked so much better than the other random nozzle designs.
I don't know the history of this change, or if Nick Stratton is responsible for the E3D trash talk (I don't remember that from Brian, though he was talking on the thread @DocTrucker posted), but he claims to be the designer of the new V6-lookalike (looks more like a Volcano). See https://hotends.com/j-head - "J-Head
All-Metal HiFlow... designed by CEO Nick Stratton". So it seems like a different company now. I can't vouch for it.Who did you talk to at MRRF, @Phaedrux ? What were you impressed by?
Ian
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@droftarts I can't recall who specifically it was I spoke with, but they had a tool changer setup that used 8 tools with a double sided head with all the tools on a bus system running on a ramps. It was pretty ingenious. The hotends they had there looked nice. Well machined, solid. It looked like they printed nice based on the parts on that tool changer.
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Thanks all. Looking at the latest there just doesn't seem to be much to distinguish it from the Volcano, and ontop of that you have to hunt around to find the 285C max, and there's little in the way of spares listings or drawings.
For a while I thought I had found a good economy second manufacturer but there is too many things I'm not comfortable with in the back story.
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Hello,
I just found this thread and apologize for being late to respond. I am the designer of the original "J-Head" hot-end, former owner of the hotends.com website, and owner of Reifsnyder Precision Works. Sometime in 2018, and due to reasons I'd rather not post, I made a bad business deal with the current owner (Nicholas Stratton) of hotends.com. The hotends at MRRF in 2019 were made by me. However, after MRRF 2019, and my disagreement with the actions of Mr. Stratton, I parted ways with what is now his operation and have nothing to do with hotends.com. The current hotend designs are not of my design and I don't know how much they may deviate from what I offered.
That all being said, I am still making hot-ends and can be contacted at reifsnyderb@hotmail.com.
Best Regards,
Brian Reifsnyder
