What’s up everyone, Tom here, and have you heard of Dyze Designs?
Well, i certainly hadn’t, but it turns out they make a hotend capable of printing at
500°C. Which is insane.
So let’s check it out!
So along with the hotend, called the DyzeEND-X, i’ve also got the Dyze-X-truder here, which
is made to pair up with the DyzeEND-X, but the hotend mount, quite a smart solution imo,
also fits E3D hotends and, obviously, any other hotend that has that same mount design.
So let’s just stick with the extruder first before we get into nitty gritty details of
the hotend design.
And that’s not going to take us that long, because, frankly, there really isn’t much
to talk about.
If you just look at it, it’s literally a black box.
There’s not even a tension adjustment mechanism, also there’s no way to look inside and no
way to easily clean out the drive gear should that become necessary.
Overall, it’s a very simple direct-drive extruder with a drive gear that looks a bit
weird, doesn’t have the sharpest tooth profile overall, but works well enough to a point
where the motor will stall before the filament starts to slip, so that’s definitely good
enough.
I did not crank up the stepper current to the full 1.68A the documentation recommends,
in fact i have no idea what the current is set to exactly, but, with a heatsink on there
and a fan blowing over it, it is set to the point where the driver will reliably work
without shutting itself off due to thermal limits.
This is a 0.9°, or 400 full steps per revolution, stepper motor, which should help with some
of the artifacts you might see with a classic 1.8° stepper used in a direct-drive application
due to their very low overall resolution of only 6 to 8 full steps per millimeter of extruded
filament.
And as far as mounting options go, there is the rather smart clamping mechanism on the
bottom, but no real standard way to mount the entire assembly, and since i couldn’t
use the “microbowden” approach i used with the E3D Titan, i had to make some slight
modifications to my printer to mount the Dyze extruder assembly properly.
In my case, i’ve printed myself a pair of adapters that fit the “RepRap” standard
50mm mounting pattern.
So to get a look at the guts, let’s take this thing apart, and i was kinda scared to
do that since the 4 visible screws do have some internal functionality as well, they
provide a hinge for the idler lever as well as the hooking point for the “custom made”
coil spring.
And we can see that the filament inside the Dyzextruder is quite well guided with very
neatly fitting teflon tubes lining every bit of the filament channel, and, not surprisingly,
it performed very well with flexible filaments, requiring almost no slowdown compared to regular
PLA or ABS.
Combined with the DyzeEND-X, a 50mm/s print speed with .2mm layers is totally possible
with flexibles and quite a bit more with PLA.
And even with these different filaments, the lack of a tension adjustment mechanism wasn’t
an issue at all, since the default tension is set quite tightly and the coil spring keeps
its tension very consistent, even with filaments that have different diameters or are more
or less compressible.
So while the Dyze-X-truder is a solid performer, i would have liked seeing a more aggressive
tooth profile and a much more accessible filament drive gear.
And at its price point, there are just much better options available if you don’t need
its all-black stealth appearance.
But let’s move on to the DyzeEND-X, and as i’ve already mentioned, this thing goes
up to 500°C if you order it that way.
There’s also a slightly cheaper and more civilian 300°C option available, and we’ll
talk about the advantages and disadvantages of each one in a second, but let’s take
a look at the rest of the hotend.
So the overall construction is fairly standard, there’s the groovemount-style mount up top,
as a part of the heatsink, which is machined from a regular extruded aluminum profile instead
of being turned or milled from a solid blank.
Good thinking there, and it means the heatsink can use somewhat finer and tighter fins than
what would otherwise be possible, which allows the hotend to get away with a tiny 25mm fan
compared to the typical 30mm ones, and as such the DyzeEND-X is a good bit smaller than,
well, pretty much every other all-metal hotend.
And yes, obviously, as a 500°C-rated hotend, it does use an all-metal construction with
the obligatory stainless steel heat break, but it also uses stainless steel nozzles.
And these aren’t your grandma’s nozzles - wait, that didn’t sound right - these
are massive chunks of stainless steel that use a spring washer to seal against the heat
break inside the heater block.
In theory, this should allow for an easy nozzle swap even when the hotend is cold, reducing
the risk of burning yourself in the process, but in my case, that didn’t really work
out.
I had already noticed that colors take quite a while to flush out after a filament change
with the DyzeEND-X, and as it turns out, that’s because there’s a fair bit of plastic stuck
around that spring washer, basically fusing the heat break and nozzle together.
And inevitably, i did bend the heat break when trying to do a cold nozzle swap, so i
guess - don’t do that?
The huge stainless nozzles are “hard”, but not hardened stainless steel, so, with
abrasive filaments, they will last longer than brass nozzles, but not quite as long
as non-stainless, hardened nozzles.
And if you’re wondering whether it’s going to be an issue that these are made from stainless
steel, basically the metal with the lowest thermal conductivity, rest assured, it doesn’t
matter.
I thought it would be an issue, but i did a quick simulation - it’s really not a problem.
At most, you’re going to see a 2° lower temperature at the filament surface than in
the aluminum block, and, honestly, that’s not even worth mentioning.
So what gives this hotend a 500°C rating is the combination of a 60W heater cartridge,
up from the standard 40W, as well as a thermistor - yes, a traditional thermistor, not a PT100
or thermocouple, which would both require additional circuitry - that is rated for up
to 500°C. Now, the more powerful heater is just downright awesome, it heats up super
quickly to the 230°C range you’d normally use and easily get the hotend up to 400°C
and more.
Dyze Design provide pre-tuned PID values for the firmware’s control loop, and those keep
the hotend super stable above 300°C, but introduce a slight bit of overshoot at regular
temperatures, but that’s not really Dyze’s fault, it’s just a limitation of the PID
control scheme.
Now, there is one downside to getting the 500°C thermistor, and that’s the fact that,
at room temperature, it is absolutely worthless.
It’s got such a high resistance below 25°C that the firmware can’t tell if the thermistor
is just cold or whether it’s not even connected.
Which means that the “mintemp” safety feature in Marlin that’s supposed to shut
the printer down down if it detects that the thermistor has somehow been disconnected,
that won’t work here.
But Dyze have a solution for this, they are offering a modified version of the Marlin
firmware that implements a bit of a more sophisticated approach with a delay that only starts checking
for the thermistor’s presence a certain time after the hotend has started heating.
And that basically gives you the same level of safety and comfort as the simple default
implementation, but of course you do need to use Dyze’s modifications and not just
the stock firmware.
And i guess it was mostly my fault that i ended up with a 24V hotend, while my testbench
Mendel90 is actually a 12V system, so i simply added a pair of boost converters for the heater
and the fan, and the wire harness on the DyzeEND-X actually made that quite simple - even though,
now, i had to stuff the wires somewhere.
It includes locking connectors for the fan, heater and thermistor right at the hotend
as well as 1m long extension wires.
All three connectors are identical, and while they do keep you from plugging them in backwards,
which really only matters for the fan, they don’t keep you from plugging in e.g. the
the heater into the fan output, which could cause some burnt transistors on your control
board.
The thermistor and fan wires do a color coding on the hotend’s side, but have non-marked
and non-polarized 10th inch connectors on the other end.
There is a bit of a faux pas for the heater’s wires, as they are stripped and tinned on
the control board’s side, which makes them a fire hazard as the tin will start flowing
away under the pressure the connector block puts on the wire and leave you with a loose
connection that only makes contact in a few spots.
Crimp lugs would have been a much more sensible choice there.
But overall, the DyzeEND-X works remarkably well and prints ABS, PLA, Ninjaflex and any
other ordinary plastic very well and precisely without jamming, and while i did try PEEK
at 380°C, i stopped that experiment pretty quickly.
Not only was it extremely hard to get PEEK to stick to anything, but the smell really
pushed it over the edge.
And that’s not the PEEK, it’s the remains of all the other plastics that are still somewhere
in or on the hotend.
And let me tell you, a coat of PLA, ABS and Polyurethane all burning up at 380°C at the
same time is really not something you want to experience.
After about 5 minutes, I was starting to get a headache and had to call it a day.
And that’s something you should keep in mind if you want to go for a high-temperature
hotend in general, you will need to insert and remove the high-temperature filament somehow,
and if you’ve been printing a comparatively low-temperature filament before, you will
be burning off whatever remains of that filament inside the nozzle.
So that 500°C rating is nice, but it’s not really practical if you also want to print
normal materials in a normal environment.
My proposition would be this: Just buy two hotends, one for normal plastics and one for
the high-temp stuff like PEEK.
The mount between the Dyze-X-truder and the DyzeEND-X makes it easy enough to open up
and swap your hotend and, honestly, when you’re paying about 600€ including tax for a pound
of filament already, one hotend more or less really isn’t going to make any difference
at all.
Conclusion time!
Let’s start with the Dyze-X-truder: While it is a solid performer, even for flexible
filaments, it lacks easy access to the drive gear for occasional cleaning or simply for
checking whether the filament is properly loaded and really doesn’t bring anything
new to the table other than using a high-resolution stepper motor.
I wonder, does that make it a retina stepper?
I’m much happier with the DyzeEND-X, as again, it’s a solid performer, but doesn’t
have any glaring downsides.
While the cold swappable nozzle and high-temperature operation are of somewhat limited use by design,
its small form factor and overall consistency make it a recommendable product.
And that’s about it!
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