This hotend gets seriously hot at up to 500°C! This does come with a few trade-offs, so is it worth it in the end?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enXSfrF7pII
whatever materials do you print at these temperatures? (can’t watch any videos right now. No No bandwidth)
@Marcus_Wolschon pretty much all of @Indmatec_Gmbh 's: http://indmatecgmbh.squarespace.com/filaments/
PEEK, POM, PEI… so all the plastics that won’t melt until everything else has already given up.
@Thomas_Sanladerer but you need a super high temp heated chamber to get any meaningful-sized prints out of those materials. The hot end alone doesn’t get you much. Also, aluminum starts to become a terrifyingly weak metal at 500C. Or even 400C. Hobbyists should stay the hell away from anything over 300C, in my opinion. Nobody but Stratasys seems to be doing the level of engineering required to print those materials safely.
@Ryan_Carlyle that sounds an awful lot like what they said when we started this entire open-source 3D printing thing!
@Thomas_Sanladerer My point is, people are working on the wrong problems. High-temp extruders are a solved problem. Use a thermocouple and steel components (no aluminum or brass or PTFE in the hot zone) and you’re done. I can think of a half-dozen extruders that can theoretically get hot enough to print super-exotics, or would only need very minor changes to do so. Making yet another high-temp extruder doesn’t contribute anything meaningful to the community because high-temp filaments have much bigger unsolved problems than hot end capability. It’s just marketing fluff without giving end-users any real capabilities to do useful things with those filaments.
If you want to print PEI and PEEK, you need to work on ways of preventing the ludicrous amount of warping that all high-temp thermoplastics create, and you need to do it without violating Stratasys’s heated build chamber patent. (Or wait 3 years for it to expire.) Warping of high-Tg polymers and crystalline polymers is simple physics. The open source community has addressed the warping problem in >99% of cases by changing the properties of filaments to be more elastic and/or lower-Tg so they can be printed without the oven-printer design stuff Stratasys does.
The materials development in our community has really followed the hardware capabilities of RepRaps. If you go the other way, you need to fundamentally rethink a lot of the concepts baked into open source designs. For example, plastic structural parts and motors/belts inside the build chamber have to go. Differential thermal expansion of frames and motion hardware becomes an issue. Print cooling paradigms have to change. Higher-cost components have to be used inside the oven.
I bet we can do it a hell of a lot cheaper than Stratasys, but it’s still a genuinely large step change in printer design. Most people don’t realize how big the design paradigm change has to be to do routine printing with those materials. That’s why it annoys me when people say “Extruder X will let you print PEEK!” Your extruder isn’t the bottleneck for that.
@Ryan_Carlyle You don’t need to violate any patent to build your own, selling things is a different story. Patent law is quite clear, you can build whatever you want. You can share designs of whatever you want for free in a non-commercial manner.
Honestly all you are saying is that people need a cnc mill and lathe capable of cutting stainless to make all the tooling for the “super high temp 3d printer”. Really you can just PID a propane torch and make the build chamber as hot as you want. It’s quite absurd the cost that goes into a normal heated bed/enclosure and would actually be cheaper if it wasn’t so “high tech”.
It really is FUD what you are saying, in before the fire hazard, yea put a stainless machine inside a concrete enclosure… duh. People have forges in $400 sheds on farms.
Open source != OSHA (see the conundrum with those letters). This is supposed to be DIY not build a product/business.
Regarding expansion of materials with heat, use ceramics or graphite. It’s really an issue solved in books from the 19th century.
@Andrew_Hodel I’m afraid you’re incorrect - items described in a patent cannot be made or used, even if not offered for sale.
“Every patent shall contain a short title of the invention and a grant to the patentee, his heirs or assigns, of the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention throughout the United States or importing the invention into the United States”
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/35/154
I have also discussed this with a patent attorney, he confirmed my interpretation.
@Tim_Elmore alright, then why is Stratasys not suing owners of barbeque pits? Otherwise known as heated chambers with variable temperature control?
Or just post the information on an offshore site outside of their juristiction, I don’t think anyone can justify owning the idea of a heated chamber and if the patent office operates and has operated in a way that does justify the ownership of that idea they are obviously wrong and would be fought at every level.
@Andrew_Hodel Because a barbeque pit is not/does not have a:
1.) three-dimensional modeling apparatus
2.) deformable thermal barrier
3.) x-y-z gantry
4.) etc
Have you read the patent? Here:
http://www.google.com/patents/US6722872
In order to infringe a patent, the device in question much match all the claims in the patent. If even one claim is not present (for example a BBQ grill is not a 3D modeling apparatus) then the patent is not applicable.
Here’s a good, already had this conversation - https://www.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/43zh0x/how_do_these_guys_avoid_the_heated_chamber_patent/
And another - http://payne.org/blog/stratasys-heated-build-enclosure-patent/
Build what you want, everyone knows those suits are just playing lawyer. There’s plenty of prior art to their patent, nobody has a good enough lawyer to disqualify it. Technically a clay forge with billows is under their patent as all the work is done outside the chamber and there is a flexible membrane.
Those guys are dicks, Stratasys that is.
Yes, I participated in that conversation on reddit as well.
A clay forge wouldn’t fall under that patent as it is not a three-dimensional modeling apparatus, nor does it have an x-y-z gantry.
Do you have any examples of this prior art that you refer to?
@Tim_Elmore An automated paint oven does - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=automated+paint+oven
They are in use everywhere and have all those parts.
Paint spraying is totally 3d extrusion (at a much finer detail) and moving a part on a conveyor belt into an oven with a door (a “flexible membrane”) is exactly that.
An automated paint oven is not a three-dimensional modeling apparatus. If you read the patent, the three dimensional object is built inside the apparatus. In the case of a paint oven, the object already exists before being moved into the apparatus for painting.
So no example of prior art, then?
@Tim_Elmore
Yes it is when the spray head moves in 3 axes.
It is certainly modeling when you are painting something, you are adding layers in a particular axis with gradients on other axes then moving things to an oven completely automatically.
They have also been in use since before Stratasys filed that patent some decades ago.
Hell you could even dilute down the currently printed materials enough to spray them on. PLA, ABS, etc.
I’d go as far to say injection molding is applicable under that bullshit patent. The tooling is outside the heated chamber in which the material is extruded into a 3 dimensional form.
@Tim_Elmore from the Stratasys patent: a three-dimensional modeling apparatus (10) that builds up three-dimensional objects in a heated build chamber (24) by dispensing modeling material from a dispensing head (14) onto a base (16) in a pattern determined by control signals from a controller (140).
That certainly describes a paint sprayer.
You will never find an attorney or judge anywhere that would interpret a paint oven as a 3D modeling apparatus. I’ve also never seen a paint oven in which there is a deformable barrier in which the modeling head passes through, which is another requirement.
Injection molding does not have an XYZ gantry, nor a deformable barrier.
You seem to be just trolling at this point.
@Tim_Elmore All you’d have to do is just build a “paint sprayer” that works over a few day period and builds up an “object” that is thicker than the 3d layer of paint that those idiots consider 2 dimensional.
Then argue the scientific fact that a single layer of paint is actually 3 dimensional (it is).
Face it, that’s what lawyers do and the good ones don’t care which side pays them more 
Enjoy the patent system folks, that’s all.