Hi everyone, i’m Tom and today we’re going to have a look at a potential solution to
a problem some printer manufacturers don’t really acknowledge: speed.
And especially, speed for those insanely large printers, like the BigRep, which, for example,
has more than one meter of build space in every direction.
Now, if you simply use a regular-sized hotend and nozzle, your print time is also going
to increase proportionally with # each dimension of the part you’re printing.
Scale it up by a factor of two in just one direction, and the print is going to take
twice as long, but if you scale it to twice the size in X, Y # and Z, the print time is
going to be # eight times as long.
So what # would be a tolerable print time for a 20 by 20 by 20 centimeter build space,
suddenly becomes a print that takes 1 hundred and twenty five times as long if you entirely
fill up a 1 cubic meter build space.
And here’s where the E3D Volcano comes in: It’s big.
It’s fast.
It’s long.
And its nozzle has a gaping hole the size of a nostril.
Well, not quite, but it’s pretty large.
So it’s really meant for printing plus-sized models on plus-sized printers.
Now, the Volcano kit itself builds on E3D’s already proven designs and is meant as an
upgrade for the v6 hotend, so the starter kit only includes a heater block, a nozzle,
a heater cartridge, a thermistor with heatshrink and sleeving / and a few screws with a disposable
hex wrench.
You could reuse some of the parts that your v6 or v5 heater block uses, but since essentially
everything that is part of the heater block sub-assembly is # included, it makes it somewhat
easier to swap between the regular and the long # Volcano heater block.
The assembly itself is practically the same as the regular v6 block: The thermistor is
securely held in place with the same combination of glass fiber sleeving and an M3 screw, the
heater cartridge now sits vertically along the melt zone and is clamped down with # two
screws instead of one, which had the heater block bending quite a bit when i tightened
the screws the first time, which ultimately didn’t matter, but it did look a bit scary
at first.
Either way, just like on the v6, it’s sure to make much better contact with the heater
block than other solutions for example using a grub screw and such.
Now, since this is basically just a new heater block and nozzle, it still uses the standard
M6 thread for the heat break, which means that the Volcano should work with any hotend
E3D ever released - so you can either use the v6 heatbreak, as intended, or the v5 heatbreak
and heatsink, or even the Kraken-style heatbreaks that fit, obviously, the quad-hotend Kraken
but can also be used in the Chimera and Cyclops heatsink, you could essentially make a double-Volcano-Cyclops-v6-thing
or even use it as quad-Volcano-Kraken-monster.
Which would be absolutely insane.
Be safe, kids.
I’m going to use the Volcano on a v5 heatbreak and heatsink, just because that’s what i
happen to have strapped into my printer at the moment.
Now, obviously, the Volcano is a good bit longer than the standard heater block, and
so is the nozzle.
The purpose here is that the filament will have more time to thoroughly heat up, but
it also means that you’ll be losing some build height - looking at what kind kind of
printer the Volcano is geared for, ok, it’s not really going to make a difference, but
it is something you should keep in mind when setting up for the first print, as your Z
endstop or any kind of bed probe # will indicate the wrong height and possibly crash the Volcano
right into the printbed.
And since it has a longer lever to the turned-down part of the heatbreak / when compared to a
# standard block, it does make the already # not-so-tough heatbreak another bit more
fragile.
So when it comes to actually printing with the Volcano, it’s pretty much what you’d
expect: since it has a .8 instead of a .4mm nozzle, both your layer height and extrusion
width should go up by about a factor of two, for a total print time decrease by a factor
of four.
If you’re feeling lucky and confident that your printer’s mechanics won’t start wobbling
around like jello, you can even increase the print speed past what you normally use with
the regular heater block.
The Volcano block seems to have plenty of power left for pretty insane speeds, but one
snag i ran into was my extruder simply not being able to keep up anymore.
I run a fairly standard Greg’s Wade extruder that has a bit higher gear ratio than usual
and i found that the stepper motor and driver just couldn’t handle what were in fact ridiculously
high speeds when i was trying to print the first layer with a three millimeter extrusion
width, a .8 mm layer height and something around a 30mm/s feed rate.
So if you really want to use all the speed the Volcano can give you, you should definitely
not be using one of the common Allegro drivers, but preferably at least the Trinamic TMC 2100
or even TI’s DRV8825 drivers.
Or, you know, any driver that can actually make full use of the torque your extruder
stepper motor can produce.
Not only is the actual printing stupid fast - i mean, look at this, this is the same part,
and the Volcano just spat it out like it was nothing.
Ok, it only used like 15 layers for the entire part, but that kinda like the point of the
entire thing.
One other thing that you initially don’t think about is that slicing and transferring
files around also gets faster, as there’s simply much less data to be processed.
While that’s, again, probably not so much of an issue for smaller prints, it does make
a very noticeable difference on the machines the Volcano is intended for.
The print quality is very much exactly what i expected - when you’re printing fat layers
with a large nozzle, of course you aren’t going to get the same kind of detail reproduction
that you’d get with a setup that’s optimized for just that.
But i’ve mentioned it before somewhere, i like big bores, and i cannot lie, / having
those visible, beautifully aligned layers is very aesthetically pleasing in its own
way.
While it’s obviously not ideal for every print, the look does work really well on simple
shapes or whenever you want to emphasize the digital or low-fi side of 3D printing.
And for larger parts, the fatter layers become much more of a texture for part instead of
a visual artifact anyways.
One thing that surprised me was how little ooze the Volcano seems to have - this is a
huge factor for those blobs that you see where one extrusion line ends and the next one starts.
And there is practically no ooze, i guess that’s because the large nozzle allows only
very little back-pressure to build up inside the heated zone and relaxes tension in the
filament along the feed path between the extruder and the hotend.
This is just cheap, white ABS that i use for practically anything.
PLA is obviously a bit runnier in both the regular and in the Volcano E3D hotend, but
the Volcano is still surprisingly good there.
Which means that even lower layer heights work decently with it, though i wouldn’t
really want to use it below a 0.25mm layer height.
/ Which is still very usable.
And as always, i still need to mention the price, which currently is 20 Great British
Pounds, so around thirty units in Euros or US dollars.
If you want a bit of a bigger variety, you can get the Volcano # eruption pack, i guess
you can see where they’re going with this, for 25 pounds, and get an additional three
nozzles in different sizes, of which the largest one is # 1.2mm.
Which is insanely large, but it’s exactly what you need when you run one of the enormously
large printers.
The pricing, i think, is very ok, considering that you’re getting a well-engineered, finished
product and not some Chinese clone ripoff monstrosity.
The Volcano surely isn’t for everyone and everything, but it’s surprisingly versatile
and when things do get big and fast, the Volcano is a very capable plastic squirter that is
definitely going to keep up.
And that’s my opinion on the E3D Volcano, i put a link to the Volcano assortment in
the video description.
If you like this video please leave a thumbs up, or a thumbs down if didn’t, but please
then also leave a comment about what i can improve on.
And let me know in comments what you think about the Volcano - is it something that you
would even consider using or would you # never trade resolution and detail reproduction for
faster prints?
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As always, thanks for watching, and i’ll see you in the next one.