Nozzles. What even are they?
Well, it turns out you need them
to print with, so that answers that.
I started this video with the expectation that I test out
some nozzles, some cheap ones and some expensive ones,
and I would see if the price
affected the quality of the print.
I'll explain at the end of the video why this isn't going
to be the case, at least in this episode,
and why I'm doing it in the next episode.
But for this one, I'm going to try to show you some really
spectacular things I found along the way.
So it might be a slight change of pace compared to usual.
You can comment below on what you think of that.
I think you will enjoy it though, so have a seat. Let's go.
[Music]
This video is sponsored by PCBWay.
I took this photo and I posted it on YouTube while I was
working on this video because
I thought it was a hilarious joke, but in
some ways this is not hilarious. The vast
majority of these nozzles that you see on
this table here, well, there's two problems
with them. The first is, they don't fit.
When I started 3D printing in 2019, and that
is 5 years ago now, when I started there
were two standards for nozzles, unless you
were using printers a bit more exotic. Well, okay, two and
a half standards for nozzles.
There was the E3D V6 nozzle and the Creality Mk8 nozzle.
The half was a volcano nozzle,
which is just an E3D V6 with a longer thread, and they did
do a supervolcano, but nobody
used that. The issue is, and this will be
an issue for the next two videos I'm making,
the issue is that none of my current printers support these
two standards anymore. I will
of course solve it, but this is a really sad
turn of events in my opinion because we now
find ourselves with way more proprietary nozzles and mostly
that affects price and availability.
And I'll talk more about
availability in the future episode.
The second problem though is perhaps what led to the first
problem. Most of these nozzles
are cheap, they're dirt cheap. This bag
of nozzles here was probably about £7 and
this one was about £7 and it comes with a plastic case.
You can get hardened nozzles,
steel ones for a couple of pounds more or
maybe even less. They're all so insanely
cheap. When you contrast that to the price
of this tin of E3D nozzles that I actually
bought for this video for £32 for 6 nozzles, and if you
buy these nozzles singly, well,
they're not cheap.
I don't know if you'd get any manufacturer to outright
admit it, but if your core business
was making nozzles then you would probably
be very tempted to make them harder to copy
by modifying the size away from a standard wouldn't you?
But there have been other market pressures
that have caused nozzles to change. One of
those of course being the demands for increased flow rate
which requires a different shape
nozzle, a different length nozzle.
Anyway, using my microscope I can take some pictures of
nozzles from the top down and
don't tune out yet because it is going to get so much
better than the images you see
on screen now, but they're just part of
the narrative, we have to go down this road.
So let's have a look at those.
[Music]
This is a photo of a nozzle taken with a camera. It's
pretty okay I guess, it's probably
what you'd get if you took a picture yourself and if you
have a phone with a half decent
camera you probably get a picture like this. You can see
the nozzle and you can see that
it is a nozzle, but you can't really see the nozzle. When
you get closer to objects that
you're photographing you have to choose. I can show you
this bit of the nozzle or I can
show you this bit of the nozzle.
And when you get a lot closer, this problem becomes worse.
And what I'm describing here is a
thing that photographers fully understand.
And I've been a photographer for far
longer than I've been a 3D printing enthusiast.
So this is second nature to people like myself.
This is something called depth of field.
And it's the maximum distance that
you can have in focus at any one time.
And this is how camera optics work.
It's how the world works.
The point being that when you get a lot
closer still, this problem becomes untenable.
But there is a solution.
There is a technique known to people who know the technique
that is known, where you take
a number of images of the object, think of it like slicing.
And then in a piece of software, you stack the images
together afterwards and you take
the parts that are in focus and you create a whole image.
This is imaginatively called stacking.
Stacking images of a nozzle means you
can see more areas in focus at one time.
[beeping]
This looks a lot cooler as you can see, but when we have
pictures from the microscope,
like earlier, where you can see the
actual nozzle at the opening, why do we care?
Well, if we want to qualitatively assess
the build quality of a nozzle, there's several
ways to do this.
You can just image the hole
with a microscope as I did before.
And this can work.
And I've seen E3D share pictures like this.
And that's how they do their quality control.
And if you do get it right, you can get a
good image of the actual roundness of the
hole and the neatness of the hole and
whether there's any defects as a hole with a WH.
You could probably even write a journal article on this and
maybe people would find it useful.
And yes, more expensive nozzles do,
generally speaking, have better shaped holes.
And neater holes.
But that doesn't even nearly tell the whole story.
With an H.
And it doesn't look very cool.
So this is what a nozzle looks
like when you stack images of it.
I think you get a much better grasp
of what the nozzle really looks like.
And this helps you when it
comes to talking about the quality.
You can see the quality of the
milling on the outside at least.
We can also stack at an angle.
Which you can't really do on a microscope.
Or rather, not with the setup
of looking straight down into it.
By the way, if you're wondering how I've
got things set up to get these stacked images
in the first place, it's
actually quite a sophisticated process.
You can learn about it on my second
channel and I will link to that below.
Anyway for fear of burying the lead,
have you ever looked inside a nozzle?
Like really looked inside a nozzle?
(soft music)
I find watching these stacks build is fascinating. I'm
using Helicon Focus to stack these images.
I do recommend that software. This is not sponsored by
them, I'll have to buy a license.
Which is a good time to mention that this
episode and the next two will probably be
the most expensive episode I've ever made. Just simply due
to the amount of random hardware,
nozzles, camera equipment and even this software. That
would not be possible without sponsorship
and Patreon members. I'm very appreciative
of the support that both of those give that
enables me to do this stuff. The channel would be a lot
more boring without access to those
resources. If you do enjoy this content and you want to
help out with making this kind
of thing, then even just making sure
that you're subscribed will have an impact.
The funny thing about focus stacking that
I never really thought about before is that
the software has to generate a depth map,
meaning it has to know how far back each image
is focused when it does the stacking. The side effect of it
doing this is that the software
has to know some things about the geometry
of the thing you're photographing. And so
you can do this. This gives us way more insight into the
dimensionality of the defects with
the nozzles. You can see on the cheap ender nozzle for
example, the bad tip is it's a
three dimensional problem. And you can also see, although
the software is not infallible,
but the sides of the brass nozzles are so
smooth that it confuses the generation of
the model. And the parts you might think run up the side
are only the very bottom parts.
And there's a whole length of a brass nozzle that just
reflects it's so smooth. But it's
time for the ugly end of things. This
nozzle is a hardened steel one. I don't know what
the deal is with this nozzle, but it certainly doesn't look
good. Comparing an E3D nozzle
with a cheap one, you can also tell the difference. You
might have noticed that I'm having some
trouble lighting the back of these nozzles
in some cases. I've covered the reasons why
that's the case on the second channel and
what I'm trying to do about it. But the TLDR
version is a good segue to the video's sponsor, which is
PCBWay. PCBWay can make your custom
PCBs, which is why I'm talking about this. I want to solve
this problem by making a thin
light source, and I mean very thin. And if
you look at this decoration they sent me as
part of a Christmas present, they made
this in house, and this made me think, that's
what I need to do. I need a ring of LED so thin that it
will fit around the macro lens.
I know what you're thinking, that would be a ring light,
but ring lights are too deep,
and I want it to be exactly the right size, so I'm
measuring it and designing the PCB
around the exact size I want. This is something I'm
planning to complete and get made before
the next video, so stay tuned and hopefully I'll be able to
show you that actually working.
PCBWay can make the PCB exactly the shape and size you
want, just like the ring I need,
and they can do it in a variety of colours, like I'll
probably go with black mask to
cut down on stray reflections. It's pretty easy to order
using the automated form, but
help is a single click away via live chat
if you need it. Don't forget that PCBWay
also have other capabilities too, like CNC and 3D printing
services. Check out the video
description where you will find a promotion if you follow
my link. Thank you PCBWay for
sponsoring this video, and let's get back to it.
So the interesting thing about Creality style nozzles, and
these are the ones we are seeing
on the K1 and KE and CR10, these are the biggest surprise I
think, because the images show
an incredible standard of finish internally. The Creality
nozzles are also not expensive.
So that makes you think that maybe you can make nozzles at
a low price without compromising,
and that is food for thought. Of course if you want to
guarantee consistency, you will
find as I did the expensive nozzles like the... um...
brosle? That is actually the name, brosle.
Or E3D, or Prusa ones, which I want to say are made by E3D
because they look very similar
under magnification. These expensive
nozzles are definitely really consistent and very
neatly made with good centred holes and no
major burring on the inside. And this does
I suppose lead us to a very difficult conversation. E3D's
V6 nozzles and volcano nozzles aren't
nearly as easy to get hold of as cheap Amazon ones, and
let's be honest, the E3D ones do
seem a little too expensive. Bamboo nozzles and Prusa MK4
nozzles are clearly very well
made but they're completely bespoke and even more
expensive. Creality and Sovol and Elegoo
are all making their own nozzles and they're not
necessarily expensive but it makes it
a lot harder to get a bag of cheap nozzles or a bag of
nozzles in multiple sizes for
multiple printers at all. Because they have to be sent to
wherever you live from China.
But on the flip side, are we getting better print quality
because of this? Is the bespoke
ification of nozzles making it less likely
that they will be commoditized and cheapified
to the point where they become terrible? And yes, I did
just make up two words, possibly
even three. The answer is I simply don't
know. I would like to know. And I would like
to know if that's the case already. Never mind for the
future. And testing whether that's
the case already is for next time. I felt
that it would not do this video justice to
just tag that onto the end and rush through
it. And that's what I would need to do. And
I'd also need to get the enders working so
that I can put the ender nozzles in them.
And I'd need a printer running a V6 nozzle. And that would
be something like a Prusa with
an adapter. I would need to run all these
print tests in parallel somehow across all
these nozzles, including the Prusa with its proper nozzle.
And I'd want to get the Creality
nozzles I showed you in. Somehow I also still have missing
sizes and I need more nozzles.
And I want to get that lighting sorted as
well so I can get more pictures there. It's
just too much to prepare for one video and
I didn't want to delay the episode. So we
will just have to wait for that. And on that note, I will
end. If you've found this episode
enjoyable then put a comment below to let
me know so that I know whether this sort of
thing is worth doing again. If you didn't
then I guess let me know but whatever, you
can't win them all. I will see you
next time. Thank you for watching.