[ Slithering Sounds ]
[ Snake Hiss ]
Doom da doom da doom doom doom...
Oh, shoot.
A Copperhead!
[ Snake Hiss ]
This is the Slice Engineering Copperhead, Creality Ender Upgrade Kit.
That is a mouthful.
They sent this over a while ago and I haven't had a chance to try it out yet,
so we are going to slap it into this
otherwise entirely stock Ender 3 and test it out.
In the kit
you get a lot more thermal paste than you'll need just for this install,
which is excellent
because I use this boron nitride paste from Slice on every project I work on.
You also get a .4mm BRIDGEMASTER, wear resistant carbide coated copper nozzle.
But of course the heart of this is the CopperHead copper heater block
and the bi-metallic heat brake that comes in this kit.
These are both said to increase throughput, not entirely sure
what that means, and supposedly minimize clogging due to heat creep.
Let's get this kit in here
and we'll talk about the benefits or claims of it as we go.
Now, this is meant to be a direct upgrade for printers like this
that have the original mk8 style hotend in them.
So all they need to do is remove this shroud off
of the carriage to gain access to the hotend.
Important note you need to have a mk8 or a clone of one
that has the set screw in the front of the heatsink so
the new assembly can be installed in place of this original heater block.
I have to remove the original thermistor
and heater cartridge from the original heat block
because we're going to reuse those in this particular kit.
Once those are out, I'll remove these two screws
holding the heater block to the heat sink and stabilizing it.
And then we just need to remove the set screw in the middle of it
to remove the heat brake and heater block.
Well, that came out pretty easy.
And here is the original heat break and heater block
assembly next to the CopperHead that is replacing it.
Something to note, the CopperHead is a hair longer,
so I may have to adjust the Z limit switch when I put this together.
I'll apply a little thermal paste to the heat break
so that it has good conductivity to the heat sink,
then into the original heat sink goes this assembly.
I just need to tighten that set screw in place to hold it.
The CopperHead has two chambers on it.
Lower one is where our heater cartridge fits into and the upper one
is where our thermistor goes.
In this case, a glass bead thermistor.
But this is clearly more so intended for something like these NTC100Ks
that have this metal
sleeve on them or a PT1000 that would have a similar design to this.
What they want you to do is absolutely flood
this upper chamber with some thermal compound.
Just fill it up.
There are sleeves available for the glass bead to allow it to fit into
bores like this that some other hot ends will come with.
Kind of wish they would have done that here.
Now for the heater cartridge chamber, they want us to use these little swab
things they send with and really coat the inside of that, which is
what I'm going to go ahead and do, make sure it's all throughout there.
So we get good contact between the stock heater
cartridge and this chamber.
Now we slide in the heater cartridge and the thermistor to their homes.
This little hex screw
goes back into place just like this one on that side is in place
to lock both of those in the back side of the copper
and heater block has a couple of wrench flat spots
so I can hold it still and not worry about bending the heat
break, which in a design like this can be a concern.
I'm going to give the nozzle a quick tighten before I heat it
and then hot tighten it just to hold everything in position.
Yea, I don’t love how that feels.
Make sure that set screws good and tight
and clean off this excess paste.
Now I can reinstall the shroud over top of the original wiring
and hot end heat sink now and I have this on here and assembled.
I can see that, yes the heater block is lower
and I will have to adjust the Z limit switch.
But that also means that the part
cooling duct is just blowing on the heater
block, cooling it off and not cooling the filament.
So Slice has this longer one on their website.
I already printed it out in ASA.
I'm just going to replace this and we can move forward
and now we can see the new duct definitely comes down lower.
I still would like it to go even a little lower
if it was me, but worry about dragging on curling filament, so makes sense.
This should work.
Now I need to fire this thing up,
hook up my laptop and do a PID-Autotune for that new heater block
so that I can ensure that my settings are all correct for that.
We're ready to go
with actually print testing this thing because I actually already did some print
testing with the old nozzle.
Obviously, I mean the old hot end / nozzle.
Now, they did not expressly claim that this thing will
if flow better than the stock hot end.
It says “increased throughput” in their marketing material.
No idea exactly what that means.
Maybe they just mean you prevent clog so you can run through more prints.
Potentially I can see it meaning that.
I scaled up my Voron V0 racetrack design to run on this machine.
Because of its lower accelerations I wanted to have it be able
to actually achieve maximum speeds and ran it with the original hot end.
And I also ran a bridging test because they called that nozzle the BRIDGEMASTER.
I set the CopperHead equipped Ender 3 to printing with some GreenGate3d PETG.
The same thing I used for the stock hot end testing
and I also use the exact same g-code as I did with the previous test and...
it did significantly worse than these stock results.
I had a pretty quick assumption as to what my problem might be here.
So I revisited the test.
I just started it over again,
setting the temperature once it actually got going from the 245C,
I previously ran it at, up to 255C and then it ran successfully.
So let's just check out the results, then I'll explain what I think happened here.
I put all three results on the chart here, the Stock Hotend, the 245
C CopperHead run and the 255 C CopperHead run.
And obviously the CopperHead is flowing better with the higher temperature.
Now it's hard to say whether or not the stock hotend might have flowed
better at that temperature too.
But as it's PTFE lined, it very well also might have just melted the PTFE tube.
So we improved flow, but only with a bump in temperature.
But the thing is this GreenGate3D PETG, I generally run this stuff more like
235C on almost all of my machines
because it's a fairly low temperature PETG.
So 245 was already bumping up from my standard temp
I would usually run, trying to promote better flow in these tests.
255C is well above what I would usually run.
So I have two guesses as to what's going on with this CopperHead setup.
It could be a little bit of both of them.
The BRIDGEMASTER nozzle is carbide coated, which is likely
reducing the thermal transfer from the heater cartridge to the filament,
thus causing a need for higher heat
input to get the same or better flow rates out of this hotend.
My second guess is something I'm less confident about,
but I noticed while unboxing that the heater cartridge port
and the thermistor location are directly next to each other.
So as the heater core heats up,
the thermistor is almost immediately sensing that heat input.
While the filament path is off to the side of both of those on various
other hotend designs, the thermostat
and heater cartridge are often separated farther apart.
So the heat has to travel from the heater cartridge, often through the heat
break area, the filament path to get to the thermistor.
It's often said, or theorized, that that causes the actual temperature
at the filament path to be a little higher because the thermistor
is separated from the heater cartridge by that filament path.
In the CopperHead design, we are more directly
sensing the heater cartridge temperature & the hot block temperature.
A flow to this is that the Stock Creality heater block has the thermistor
very close to the heater cartridge as well.
So I don't know.
So let's take a look at the Bridging test.
These Bridging tests are really hard to film and show accurately, especially
because I am seeing very little difference between the two of these.
So that BRIDGEMASTER nozzle is maybe not doing that much here.
On the green one, which is the stock Creality hotend design,
I would say the first bridge, maybe the second one is
where I would consider good or acceptable.
And the rest of them are just poor quality.
On the pink one, which is the CopperHead one,
maybe the third one is better than on the stock one.
So a slight improvement. But realistically,
the first and second are still where I would want to be on this.
So not really any improvement there.
Something I forgot to mention earlier is this CopperHead kit also converts
this hotend to accept M6 RepRap style
nozzles, a.k.a E3D V6 style of nozzles.
So that opens up a lot of high quality nozzle options for this machine now,
but it does mean you’re not going to be able
to use your back stock of Mk8 style nozzles in here anymore.
I don't have any CHT nozzles for a Mk8 hot end, but I do for RepRap.
So I threw it in here and ran one more test.
And honestly,
the results were not any more impressive than the BRIDGEMASTER nozzle.
It didn't improve over that.
We seem like we may have hit a wall
with this setup and we're not going to push passed it.
And I think that extruder assembly that's on there is probably part of it.
That’s
still the plastic body, single gear drive extruder that came stock on this machine.
As I said, this machine is stock other than now swapping to the CopperHead.
Clearly I don't have nearly enough testing to give a full on review of this.
But let me give you my first impressions, a mini-review.
I like that we converted to RepRap style nozzles on the setup now.
I like that we have an all metal hotend
that I can effectively print ABS and ASA safely on.
We have a minor bump in flow rate.
The quality of the parts is excellent.
Is it worth $99?
I really don't know about that.
There are other hot ends available that could be directly bolted into this,
that would also give me all of those features for less money.
So I don't know something that might be a big deal to some of you out there.
This is made & designed in the USA, so there might be some added value there.
If you are interested in trying this thing out for yourself, head over to Slice’s
website and use discount code: ALANM5 to save 5% on your entire order.
I'm well aware of the testing I did here is in exhaustive, not very scientific
and just plain flawed.
In the time that I had dedicated this project,
it was what I was able to do and I just wanted to give you
some idea of what you were getting into if you were on one of these setups.
I have some big plans for this Ender 3 and I am going to leave the CopperHead
in there for further testing, which may come out in a workshop
vlog video where we work on smaller printer projects down the road.
That's going to wrap it up for this one folks,
I hope you found this video interesting.
If you did, please drop it a LIKE. It really helps out.
Let me know in the COMMENTS: Are you considering CopperHead?
Are you running one now?
Let us know what you're thinking in the COMMENTS down below.
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