magnetic hotend changer variation

thingiverse

Here's my version of Skimmy's magnetic hotend changer, I liked his one and loved it so much - thanks skimmy! However, I wanted to make some additional changes. This new design should be compatible with the original hotend, as I only made a few adjustments. I designed this for my Sparkcube XL with an E3D-V6 Hotend, using the original carriage from the Spark but with a slight loss in building height which is completely fine by me. I changed quite a bit on my spark, so I'm unsure how much of the reduction in height is due to these holder changes. All hotend holder parts including the fanducts were printed in ABS. My printer has seen around 200 hours of continuous printing with ABS (up to 260°C) using two E3D-V6 Hotends on my Sparkcube and also about 25 hours printing PLA (up to 210°C) with the fan duchs, even including their own production time. So far, I have only tried the E3D with this setup... I've found that the fanducts work beautifully when using them with PLA and there are no issues at all - not even without the 40mm-fans for an extended period of time. It seems like the built-in E3D-fan does provide some extra assistance from inside the printer, which is pretty cool! Let me break down the different parts: First up is the mounting plate which gets screwed onto the carriage and looks a bit larger compared to Skimmy's design with bigger screws space but it should still work perfectly well with his one. The hotend holder itself has been slightly altered, but I made sure to leave the rest intact - specifically the magnetic bits like the center magnet which have their same positions so they still work perfectly. However, what was a bit frustrating about them originally is that my E3D-V6 kept falling off no matter how accurately I tried to place it onto the magnets on this spark. However with some added M3-Nuts and washers I managed fix it nicely into place now! Now instead of trying to make one single exacting print (and still having those other additional tiny bits fall off when trying out any further variations, haha) now this version holds its position solid as rock using just that simple M3 screws + nuts - what a game changer. Then I made two new holes - and placed them nicely in the middle of it where you'd put these cables through (in fact you already knew you could use one round gap), but not so much with your Hotend cable. What would be better is actually just cutting a longer path like Skimmy had designed his part. I can now attach extra fanduct wires for future experiments - as in when maybe some other day maybe some cables are plugged differently... who knows, maybe they get even smaller ones! There's an optional bit to run more wiring through there later which looks like the cable clips that might fit nicely if anyone wants it someday & you'd want add one too. I then went ahead and included a few extra M4-holes including Nuts on each side for easy addition of other things (or removing anything else). In conclusion I did end up changing quite some things on this thing so let me know what else could use improvements here too! Finally there are two of these blue fanduct parts made specifically for 40mm-fans and also the common E3D-V6, with enough space around them not causing any heat problems from overheating (because that would really bad if you get any heat stress). They just kinda sit right above. Each duct was fitted by four M4x16 countersink screws each - no issues with getting those in there! I'm still running two hotends with an hour a half usage & have seen some nice performance increase thanks to it which made this thing much nicer compared my past prints. One other nice little detail: you will want unstick these fan duches with tape since it'll pop right off but dont need it as well; that extra strong force I got from magnet - probably more then enough power in there (it kinda felt).