e3d v5 Silicone Mold

thingiverse

Edit: 7-17-16 Final edit before calling this one done. It may be subject to further improvement or iteration later, but for now I consider this part complete. Because the parts fit together pretty tightly, it may be necessary to trim a little plastic here and there to get them to fit together. May your prints never fail. o7 Edit: 7-9-16 Just pulled this back up to run over it one more time. I have been using a silicone insulator made with this since I uploaded it to Thingiverse, so about 3 months now. Haven't had any problems with it at all. Overhangs and bridging is even easier now, not to mention my nozzle doesn't have to work as hard to stay hot. I designed the parts with 123D Design, but I very quickly felt limited by the software, so I moved on to Fusion 360. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to do any 3d modeling. It's a massively powerful program and being updated all the time. I will be updating this design and reprinting it as soon as I am finished with the design. Once that's finished, I'll call it a complete part and make sure everything else on the page is fixed up. I hope this thing helps someone out there! I designed this file and printed it on my own Prusa i3 Rework, 3mm filament, a heated bed, and a 0.4mm nozzle. These are just silicone molds for an e3d v5 rev3 heater block insulator. They should press together only one way and they should print fairly quickly. Use really light infill, I'm sure it won't hurt. These are not really intended to be heavy use. More like a once or twice use item. Not to be lazy, but check out amaurer's version for instructions on how to prep the molds and silicone. Not my idea, so thanks for the idea amaurer! I saw this on reddit just the other day and thought I'd make one for myself. Turns out I have an e3d v5 and they're not quite the same beast. I did search and couldn't find anyone who had made a version of this for the e3d v5 rev3, so I figured I would try my hand at my first real design. Hopefully if anyone else has an e3d v5 rev3 and wants to make their own little custom silicone insulator, now they can. You might want to use some support for the outer knobs on the inner mold, because they may not print very well due to overhang. I had to nick just a few corners on my two outer molds to get them to fit together just right, but that's down to printer calibration and over/under extrusion. The inner mold is the right size for the e3d v5 rev3 heater block. The mold gives you a silicone insulator 2.5mm thick. It's easy enough to trim the flashing from the mold down. Just took me a few minutes. Performed a few quick PID autotunes to recalibrate the heat after the insulator was installed. Works like a charm. Let me know if you would like me to modify this, create other iterations, or make any sort of improvements to the design.