Custom 5 in 1 hot end, direct drive, bl-touch, 20mm noctua cooling, cable management, RGB lighting

thingiverse

custom hot end for creality printers, if you remove your old hotend you can just screw this one in the backplate of creality printers. maybe other brands fit as well, but i havnt tested it, let me know in the comments if it fits. It features: -Direct drive, a mountingplace for the extruder to be placed right above the hotend. -BL-touch, a mountingplace for the BL-touch sensor for auto bed leveling -noctua cooling, a mountingplace for the NF-A4x20 fan. who likes the stock fan anyway? its loud but cools good. the problem with silent fans is they tend to spin slower resulting in worse perfomance. the noctua A4x20 is twice as thick as the original fan so it can cool right without making audible noise. -cable management, normally the cables hang onto the PTFE tubing, but with the direct drive the PTFE tubing isnt there anymore. This design gives the option to add a cable chain to prevent the cable from hanging in the way. (i havn't done a cable chain yet and didnt have any problems but if you want the piece of mind you can) -RGB lighting, who doesnt like some lights to make their printer look fancy? you can just slide a led strip in the frame but the stock hotends doesnt have a good place to mount LED's. This hotend has a mountingplace for at least 5 leds under the hotend. installation if you dont want rgb you can skip step 4 and if you dont use a BL-touch you can skip step 1)print the file custom hot end v25.stl and remove the support 2)remove the stock hotend and unscrew the heatsink with heating element and nozzle. 3)mount the noctua fan from on the custom hot end with the 4 screws included with the fan. you put the fan in from the outside and screw it in from the inside. guide the cable trough its cable guide and leave it there for later. 4) now is a good time for rgb. on the underside of the hotend there is a place to stick some RGB strip on in an L-shape. you can put 3 by 2 leds in there (with a 60 led/meter strip) but its a tight solder so if you want you can put 2x2 leds in there for an easy way to solder it. guide the cables from the rgb trough the little hook and trough the BL-touch cable guide. 5)to mount the hot end, you have to remove the heatsink etc first, because the hotend uses a screw behind it. you have to put the heatblock cables trough this design so you have to unscrew the heating cartridge and thermistor, put them trough the cable guide and hole and screw them back into the heatblock. 6) with the nozzle etc hanging loose, you can unscrew the top 2 wheels, put the screws trough the custom hot end and screw the wheels back in. there are 2 holes for 2 other screws but they dont align properly and the 2 big screws from the wheels are more then enough. 7) now you can mount the heatsink back in place, you have to mount them trough the fan, i am sorry for the inconvenience, but with an hotend this complex mouting aint easy. it are only 2 screws but it can be a hasle. if the heating cartridge doesnt allign with the extruder later on, you can put the 2 rings behind the heating cartridge instead of in front. 8) unscrew the extruder motor from its original position and mount it on the custom hot end. you have to cut a little piece of PTFE tubing to size to fit between the extruder and nozzle. then you can just screw the extruder on there and you are good to go. for a direct drive you might need a longer cable for the stepper motor. 9)for the ones using a BL-touch it is a good time to mount it now, just screw the BL-touch in with the 2 screws and guide the cables trough the cable guide. 10) optial, i havnt done this yet but i designed the hotend to fit a cablechain so if you want a cable guide for all the cables on the X-axis you can print more pieces to create a chain with these files: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2920060 print enough of the cableChain_link_v3.stl and cableChain_linkCover_v2.stl to make a chain. you would need to desing something to mount them at the old extruder place. let us know in the comments if you have a good mountingbracket. calibration when you change the cooling on your hotend you might wanna recalibrate your PID settings, they tell the printer how to go to a certain temperature and keep it there. here is a good short video on how to tune PID settings; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9Rdid-T-Gw&feature=youtu.be&ab_channel=Breaks%27n%27Makes sources: -I designed this one myself, but i based it on this stand alone direct drive bracket i used before: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4153286/files -for the cable guide on the X-axis i use this cablechain i mentioned earlier: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2920060