E3D Silicone Socks - Cleaner nozzles and sharper prints.
Pumped to be finally getting these out! Took way longer and a lot more effort than expected, but they’re here and awesome. So many people have been asking about these since we teased them on reddit. Glad to finally have them out there!
Yeah! Been waiting since you announced them at the Midwest RepRap Festival.
Very, very nice! Since I didn’t seem to find it anywhere, will they also come with the Lite hotends?
@John-Paul_Hopman I can’t believe it took as long as it did, you can see on the website the many iterations and prototype moulds. Silicone is a weird material to design for, quite different to injection moulded plastics.
@Imants_Treidis Yep, one will come with every full hotend kit, including Lite6. Chimera comes with 2, and Kraken with 4 
Ok, I’m sold then, time to replace my v5 to either Lite or full v6 
They did several prototypes AND STILL GOT A BAD FIT? Are you kidding me?
@Rene_Jurack Read the blog post! The fit is perfect, just silicone has a crazy high thermal expansion coefficient. When cold they are a touch small. When they heat up the sock expands to a perfect fit.
Nonsens. I do these type of silicone covers on my own since months. And for every kind of (custom-)heater block I have. I guess I have made more than 15 different designs with more than 100 in total… That silicone is so stretchy, you don’t need to design it “too small when cold”. Even in worst case ( α =300, ΔT=300 ) it’s going to expand less than 0,5mm…
@Sanjay_Mortimer1 that’s what makes authentic merchandise from e3d worth it, you guys put so much thought and care into the design and manufacture.
@Rene_Jurack It’s possible that your RTV silicones have different expansion coefficients to these compression moulded heat cured resins.
The simple reality is that we made a LOT of prototypes, and tested a lot of them and they fit and work best when scaled to these dimensions.
I was seeing around 0.8-1.0mm of expansion in the long direction (hard to measure) when heated.
With the current dimensions the part fits completely perfectly with a nominal target temperature of 240C, while still being good from 190C to 300C. Not conjecture or theory, measured reality.
It’s also possible that our thin walls with the very close tolerance of the nozzle from the sock makes accounting for dimensions much more critical. If we were just having a sock that went around the block it wouldn’t matter, but being that we are getting to within 0.5mm of nozzle tip we need it spot on.
Nice! Great price too!
Do I need to upgrade to thermistor cartridge or will it fit around the original V6 screw held thermistor?
@Liam_Jackson It is designed for the thermistor cartridge block. Hence the upgrade pack that gets you all the bits you need for the new block, cartridges and sock.
I’ve not actually tried putting it onto a clamped thermistor block. It would probably kind of fit, but with a big gap. I’d be nervous of using it like that, but will check and see what it’s like.
Any plans of creating something for the volcano nozzles?
<3
@Dushyant_Ahuja yes! Check out the sneak peek at the end of the blog post. @Tim_Elmore1 suggested getting them in lava red, which is obviously an excellent idea. They should be here in about 3-4 weeks.
Awesome! Stoked on this. We just got them in.
Last week I just got done designing a mold and bought some high-temp silicone to cast my own. I was going to sell them at River City Labs. If only I waited one more week! Oh, well…I got the 3-pack. 
@Sanjay_Mortimer1