Hotend upgrade?
None stock hotend is perfectly fine for PLA.
Again?! E3D?
Check your mail?!
That was just frickin weird.
The all new E3D Revo CR, let's
check this out.
It was not quite a year ago with the folks at E3D released
the rapid change Revo system upon the RepRap community.
We have in front of us today is the newest in the Revo product
line, the Revo CR, the Creality variant.
Let's take a closer look at this
and we'll talk about the Revo system a little more.
Popping open the plain jane eco friendly box, we find the hot end
sitting in a paper tray, that's also recyclable.
Now, this comes with a .4mm nozzle pre-installed.
You can get a basic setup that is just that or this kit form,
which also comes with the 0.2, 0.6 and 0.8mm nozzles.
There's a new 0.1mm nozzle, but they don't seem to be including that in kits yet.
Underneath the tray will find two wire sets.
You have the heater circuit one and the thermistor circuit one.
Both are well terminated for use in, say, a Creality type machine.
(JK) You've got ferrules on the heater circuit one and on the thermistor
one you have a DuPont connector to plug into your main board.
You also have a set of splice connectors inside of here.
I don't love these things, but I understand why they're here.
It's so if you don't want
to have to replace all of your heater circuit wiring, your thermistor wiring,
you can use these to splice the ends of your wires
right at your hot end to save yourself some trouble.
Or to tie into something like a Ender 5 Plus, which is going to have
significantly longer wires.
This can save you a lot of trouble in that regard.
For anybody who's not familiar let's quick discuss, What are the Revos?
There are timestamps below
if you're well acquainted with this and you want to skip ahead.
The Revo family is a line of hot
ends for the folks at E3D, the makers of the venerable V6.
Which has become the de facto standard in 3D printing for a while now.
The Revo line is a truly one handed and tool-less nozzle changing system.
You just grab the nozzle, once it's cooled down enough to touch,
and spin it out with your fingers.
You get the nozzle and its incorporated heat
break out of the heatsink in about 15 seconds.
The nozzle
and heat break are one complete unit and they are considered an "all metal"
design capable of printing higher temp materials like ABS, ASA and Nylons.
The hot end has this unique round heater element that surrounds the melt
zone of the nozzle, incorporates the heater and the thermistorinto
there, and attaches to the heat sink via a little coil spring.
That also puts pressure on the nozzle to both hold it in place
once it's installed and keep the heater element where it needs to be.
The Revo heater
elements are rated at 40 watts and capable of 300 degrees Celsius out of the box.
Personally, I replaced the E3D V6 in my Prusa Mk3S+ with a Revo Six,
which is meant to directly replace the V6 hot ends, about a month ago.
And I have not regretted it in the least.
I have had multiple days where I changed from 0.4 to 0.6 to 0.8
mm nozzles all in a single day worth of printing.
And now there is the Revp CR.
Up until now, you have been able to install a Revo into an Ender 3
or other Creality machine, but it required some type of 3D
printed adapter or machined adapter pieces to make it happen.
This one however is directly intended to replace a Mk8 style hot end
with no other modification required, not even firmware changes.
This means your CR-10, your Ender 3 any number of Ender 3 clones
that use a Mk8 style hot end,
they're all going to be able to just directly swap to the setup.
Let's see what machines I've been able to fit this onto so far.
Will it fit the Ender 3 Pro?
Yes, it will.
An Ender 3, Pro, or V2?
Yes, of course.
I mean it would be silly to release a product if it didn't fit the Ender 3.
But what about all the Ender 3 clones on the market?
Something like this Elegoo Neptune 2 here?
Unfortunately, not without some modifications.
Yeah. See, this one has a bit of an issue.
The problem
with this particular clone is the hot end is in the middle of the carriage plate
with the hardware for the lower V-slot wheel directly behind the heater block.
So when you try to install the Revo CR,
it hits that hardware and prevents it from being properly installed.
I did find that about 3 to 4 mm worth of washers stacked up or a 3D
printed spacer would probably put it into a range that would mount properly.
But you might have to modify the top of the fan shroud to make that work.
This is a relatively minor issue.
I just wanted to make a point about it.
So if you have an Ender 3 clone of some type that you want to install
this on, you'd be aware of this going into the project.
Hey, just before we install this thing and test
print with it, I want to thank my patrons on Patreon.
It is thanks to you folks that content like this is at all possible.
Making these videos requires days of effort,
various materials for test printing, and putting these parts together,
and you allow that to happen!
I greatly appreciate it.
And I just released a new "Can" can cup design
with cans for the handle that holds you 12 ounce Cans nice and securely.
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All right, let's get this thing installed and printing.
We are going to be putting this in my original Ender 3,
the one that I have owned the longest at this point.
This is the machine that I legitimately want to use this hot end in
and the one that I print with the absolute most.
So I thought it would be a really good way to compare print results
that I usually get off of this machine to switching over to the Revo.
Time to get to work on this thing.
Quick tip
on how to push a couple of wires through your nylon sleeving.
Put some heatshrink over the end of your wires
to cap them off a little bit and give them a slightly smoother tip to them.
If you try to push them through with just the wires,
they're going to grab on the holes in the nylon
sleeving as they go with this there is much less chance of doing that.
So I got my wires run through the harness and into the electronics box.
Now, the problem I've run into is the thermistor
harness is pre terminated with a DuPont connector.
But the connector right there at the end of the main board
on this board, which is a BigTreeTech SKR Mini E3 v2 is a JST-XH connector.
But that's the same connector that the factory Creality board uses.
It's not just this aftermarket board.
As you can see here,
the thermostat port is also in the same location on the quality board
as on the big tree tech board.
That DuPont Connector is just not correct for this application.
I was able to force it on to the port
and it seemed like it was going to work, but I didn't love it.
So I ended up taking it off and putting a proper JST-CH
on the end of there, which did require re-crimping.
After spending all the time
fishing the wires through the Creality harness I ended up pulling them back out
and making a sub harness of just the thermistor and heater wires.
This worked out way better and it's what I would recommend
for you to do on this machine.
I am running the Hero Me Gen 6 fan shroud.
I've been running the stock hot end with that for a while now.
And the Revo CR well, it has a more rounded
and larger heat sink body compared to the factory Creality hot end.
As such, it didn't fit in the Hero Me fan shroud.
I had to hog it out with a die
grinder, open it up a little bit to create clearance for the new heat sink.
It was not a hard modification to make at all,
but it's something you should be aware of.
If you're running the factory fan shroud,
this is not something you're going to have a problem with.
It fits directly in there.
E3D does recommend you do a PID auto tune to get the most out of your new hot end.
I'm not going to include that in this video. Just to save some time.
Let me know in the comments if you want me to put together
a little bit of a basic tuning guide for your machines.
And the last little touch on my install here, I jumped into Fusion
360 and designed up a little nozzle holder that goes on the top
extrusion of the Ender 3 and will hold four of the Revo nozzles in it.
This is inspired by a design that I got off of Printables
that I printed for my Prusa when I did the Revo swap on that.
Now let's get into test printing with the setup to test the Revo
CR I wanted to print something at different scales and do it as quickly
as I could to really show the power of a system like this.
So I ran off and printed the flexi dolphin from Flexi Factory.
Because I've printed this design many times,
I have prints from the old hot end that I can compare to,
and it just felt like a good call.
Looking at these prints up close. They're not perfect.
They have some room to improve.
Comparing the 100% scale 0.4 mm nozzle print with the Revo to one
that I did at 150% with the old hot end, The old one just looks better.
But you have to remember that that is after thousands of hours
of printing on this machine and many hours of tuning
that I was able to get that beautiful 150% scale dolphin.
There's something I really need to highlight here.
At the .25mm, 50% scaled off and is a great example of
when you are changing nozzles on any machine,
you should re level your bed or adjust your z offset.
If you have something like a bell, touch on it.
I did that with all four of these prints, but I didn't do a good enough job
on the point.
25 millimeter 50% dolphin.
The first layer on this looks pretty terrible and I'm not at all
happy about it.
I clearly have the level off on this one and didn't do a good enough job.
Another thing that I ran into is again, my fault is I ran the same temperature
settings on the filament that I would have run with the stock
hot end on the overhangs of a dolphin.
It looks like the material was a little bit overheated.
And mind you, this is with dual 5015 part cooling fans running at 100%.
Realistically, I should be temperature tuning all of my filaments
again with this machine, since it's technically different now.
For completely changing hot ends on this machine
going from a PTFE lined one to an all metal design,
I think the results that I got at all 4 nozzle sizes are pretty darn good.
Plenty of people have done flow rate testing on the Revo system to this point,
but I wanted to do at least one test.
In this video I tested the Creality stock end versus the Revo CR on this
little circle design that I have graduated heights on to increase the speed at.
The stock Creality
hot end started to show immediate problems at 15 millimeters a second flowrate.
It just tapped out and was immediately under extruding to the point that before
it reached the 20 millimeters per second height
it actually knocked the print clean off the bed and started to print spaghetti.
The Revo CR however had quality issues at 15 millimeters per second,
maybe some minor under extrusion, but nothing like the stock Creality hot end.
It made it to the 20 millimeter a second height where it absolutely
massively under extruded, but it was actually able to complete the print.
Not exactly a scientific flow rate test, but a mild improvement
in flow rate for the Revo CR.
Something I never did with that stock hot end on that Ender 3was print ABS or ASA.
All the parts of my Voron V0 were printed on my Prusa.
So I started printing the tool
head for my StealthBurner that is going on my Voron 2.4.
I did run into part curling issues.
This is ASA on an open machine and the AC is running in the studio.
So kind of to be expected.
Overall the print quality looks pretty darn good.
If I get around to building a temporary enclosure
or just turn the AC off in studio for a day,
I could probably get those parts printed pretty well on the Ender 3 now.
Now, side note, I'm probably going to do some live streams
when I build my Voron 2.4 as I did with my V0.
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It's conclusion time, let's wrap up the pros, the cons.
What do I really think of the Revo CR?
TLDR: I love it and I am so happy to have this in my Ender 3 now.
Changing nozzles feels like a slicer setting now.
Right before a print I can decide, "You now know I want to use a 0.8
instead of a 0.4 mm nozzle." Something like these 150% Dolphins.
I recently did a run of these for my shop and I was printing a couple of them
with 0.4mm nozzles, but it was taking so long.
I decided to switch to a 0.8mm nozzle.
Arguably, I made a stronger print that way and they were done in a half the time!
And the Revp is what gave me the power to make that decision.
If I had to stop and change the nozzle manually holding it with a wrench
and loosening things up, it's not that hard, I understand that
and it doesn't take that much time, but it just feels daunting and more stressful.
Worrying about damaging wires or twisting a heat brake any of that,
I don't love it.
The Revo is just stress free to use.
I can't overstate that.
Bit of a neutral thing.
The Revo CR is not a cheap hot end.
It's about $90
and it is an all metal hot end that comes with the heater and thermistor.
But that's for just with the 0.4mm nozzle.
It's $140 with all four nozzles that they include in the kit.
If you compare that to something like a Micro Swiss or a Phaetus Dragonfly BMS,
that will also directly bolt in, those don't come with the heater or thermistor.
But they're only $60 bucks, or about there.
No review is complete without Cons and this is not an ad.
That Thermistor Harness
coming with the DuPont Connector on there was a pretty big negative to me.
Yeah you could probably stick it on there
& probably work, but it should simply be a JST-XH.
You're going to have to splice your wiring to get it right, or recrimp
it like I did.
And then the biggest problem
is going to be the nozzles, their price and availability.
Right now on Printed Solid a single Revo nozzle
is $24.85.
I've recently been using genuine E3D nozzles for my V6 variants
and my Volcano hot ends, but they're still not merely the price of a Revo nozzle.
And there's the fact that E3D has patented this design.
It's proprietary.
So how soon are we going to see other manufacturers making these?
Since they'll have to license them, who knows?
Hasn't hit the market yet
and it's been 9 months now that the Revo has been available.
One that some people are really caught up on, I'm personally not but I can see why,
no hardened nozzles are currently available for the Revo.
They're supposedly right around the corner,
but they're not available as of this review, so I can't include that.
I'll update the description when they are available.
Is the Revo for everybody?
No, it simply isn't.
You want really high flowrate for high speed?
Something like my Voron v0 or my Voron 2.4 builds?
I'm not putting the Revo in those.
I want higher flow rates.
You're running a farm?
The consumable costs are just too high
to be changing out nozzles even once a month.
I think it would add up real quick to your costs.
But if you only have 1 to 3 machines, something like my Ender 3
where I'm not looking to push the envelope on speed,
I love having the option of changing nozzles so easily!
I hope you found this video interesting.
If you did, please drop it LIKE it really helps out.
Let me know in the COMMENTS.
What do you think of the Revo system?
I'd like to hear your thoughts.
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Thanks for coming around folks.