This is a genuine Micro Swiss CR-10 heatsink. At the time of recording,
this particular one is the only example that has ever been sent to a customer in the world.
Now, on the surface, it doesn't look any different than your typical CR-10 heatsink that you get from
Micro Swiss, but if we zoom a bit here, you're going to find one very different thing about it.
Instead of using a plastic Bowden Collet to retain a Bowden tube, it has M10 threads. Why, I hear
you asking, are you using M10 threads instead of using the traditional Bowden Collet you find in
every Micro Swiss heatsink ever? Well, it's simple. Bowden Collets are garbage. They fail
so quickly within 200 hours you're replacing them over and over and over. Using a pneumatic coupler
ain't any better. In fact, it's probably worse. Then, pray tell you may ask, what is the point
of having this custom one-off heatsink that Micro Swiss has only ever made one of because I
contacted them and requested them to make a heatsink to my specifications? Well,
the answer is this. This little doodad right here is what's known as a compression fitting. Although
it's not very ubiquitous in the 3D printing industry, it's very well-known in the plumbing
industry. You may have actually used these on water lines to your refrigerator, for instance.
However, I've discovered that when you get the threads in size correct for 3D printing
applications, they work incredibly well. Now, the reason why I like these is very simple.
It holds the Bowden tube really, really good. I'm talking just about hand-tight
takes a lot of force to pull it out. That's just hand-tight. The beauty of these things
is that they're dirt cheap. You can get five of these things
on AliExpress for like $4 with shipping. They end up costing less than a pneumatic coupler
and they're right around the price range of a typical Bowden Collet, but these grip, super,
super hard. That is why I asked Micro Swiss, "Hey, if I paid you guys, would you make me a custom
heatsink real quick?" We went back and forth with some emails and some design discussion and
eventually, they said, "Yes, we could do that for you." This compression fitting screws very nicely
into this heatsink. The beauty of it is
this heatsink was not modified by me. Everything about it comes directly from Micro Swiss, which is
fantastic. Just a quick recap. For those of you who are unfamiliar with compression fittings,
they work like this. You take the compression nut, slide it over the Bowden tube, and you take this
tiny little brass sleeve and you slide that over the Bowden tube.
Then, you take those, slide your Bowden tube into your heatsink, take your compression nut,
spin it on down, make sure it's nice and tight, and even hand tight.
That is wickedly strong. The beauty of this is, you might think to yourself,
compression fitting, isn't that going to squish the tube and make
the internal diameter of the Bowden tube a bit restrictive? The answer is no, actually.
I get what you're coming from because if you take any tube and you apply pressure to it,
you're just going to kink it off. Like any garden hose, you go from this and then you go
to pff. Well, that's going to restrict, but here's the thing. That brass compression ring covers the
entire bone tube all the way around, all 360 degrees. When it compresses, it has even force
going down around the tube. It's not actually compressing the
tube in a way that suddenly changes the internal diameter. What it's actually doing is taking that
brass compression ring and fitting it so that it fits around the outer diameter of the Bowden tube
very snugly and that is what holds it in place. I know it doesn't restrict the filament because
I have been using these brass compression fittings on my Extruder for the past month.
I have an all-metal BMG which you're going to see in a moment,
and it's been working flawlessly. That is what drove me to want to have this made because I think
we may have finally found a solution to the Bowden tube problems we all face. This is my
Ender 3 Pro and pretty much, nothing about it is stock anymore. In fact, the only thing that is
stock is probably the frame, but the Micro Swiss heatsink is the classic type that you're going to
find on their store. We're going to take a look at that and we're going to disassemble it here.
First off, we're going to remove my little fan duct. We're going to talk about that Bowden Collet
real quick because that is, in fact, why we're going through all of this in the first place.
That right there, okay. This is the Bowden Collet. It's a plastic piece that inserts into
the heatsink and then it's got four metal teeth that grip onto the Bowden tube. If you can retain
it well enough, then it will be good for a little while, but I do a lot of printing all the time
and one of the first things to fail is always the Bowden Collet or a pneumatic coupler.
In the quest for consistent performance and the least amount of maintenance,
we have come to this point where this heatsink is going to be removed and everything else is also
a genuine Micro Swiss product on this hot end. It should be quite interesting to see how it happens.
All right. We've got both heatsinks side by side, the new one on the left, the old one on the right.
As you can see, they are identical in every way, except for the top.
This is where we would screw in our compression fitting, and here is the hole
that you would put your Bowden Collet in. The old Bowden Collet just pops into here
with a wee bit of force and you've got to make sure you get it in there. Then we've got the M10
threads which much easier to put together and then disassemble if you have any maintenance reasons.
Now, here's something that I want to show everyone because I know this was a concern with a lot of
people when I originally talked about this. This is some plastic coming out of the Bowden
tube. The Bowden tube has the compression ring around it is nice and compressed
and this is a genuine Capricorn Bowden tube so the internal diameter tolerances are very tight,
but even with that, filament comes out easy enough. If I move my Extruder a little bit,
see, it's going through nice and easy here.
Nothing a BMG cannot handle. You also got to remember, PTFE is very slippery.
It's got very low friction so it doesn't appear that it's actually getting caught on anything.
Okey-doke. The compression fitting is on and we don't just have a compression fitting
on the heatsink, no, no. We've got one on the Extruder as well back there. That's my
flice attack, all-metal BMG Extruder. Let's extrude some plastic, shall we?
There we go. That seems to be coming out nice enough.
We get a better shot of everything going on here. I'm just extruding 10 millimeters at a time,
making sure everything goes good. It's coming out beautifully out of my Micro Swiss M2 hardened
steel nozzle. I'm just saying that because I like the nozzles. It's been very reliable for me, but
I think we are ready to start a benchy. Okey-doke. We've got the first layer going on our 3D benchy.
This is going to take maybe an hour and a half, two hours, something like that according to Cura.
Everything seems to be going down okay. First layer is kind of really dependending on how flat
and level your bed is and here's the access offset. I do have an auto bed leveler, but
I've been experimenting with a few solid bed mounts. If the first layer is a little wonky,
that is probably my bad. You know, it appears to be-- Oop, zoomed in a little too far there,
it appears to be going rather well, actually. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a finished benchy.
Now, admittedly, looking at the benchy, there is a lot that I could personally do in terms
of tweaking my settings in Cura to make this look a lot nicer. This is white filament so it
really is good at making every little blemish and artifact very noticeable. That being said,
software optimizations aside, it came out pretty good.
Yes, there are some zits on there that we dealt with, some seams that could be
probably optimized. What I really wanted to look at is the retractions.
Looking at that, you could probably see up at the top. I actually did a livestream of
this entire benchy being made so if you want to check out my videos and see what it was doing
at any particular point, you can definitely do that. My overhangs admittedly aren't as
good as some people's because I need to print a better fan duct, I've been meaning to put one on.
It did the job for the time being. A little bit of stringing, but this is hatch box filming.
Hatch box stuff is just super gooey in general so getting all that setup, it takes a little while.
The fact that everything turned out pretty good, at the end of the day, and yes, pretty good is
subjective to the settings and the machine. Yes, I know, I'm just preparing for the onslaught of
comments on how I can optimize my benchy. I actually optimized my printer for something
completely different, something that I print all the time for a production model that I have made,
but benchies are fun to do nevertheless. This is the benchy. Is it the best benchy?
Well, no, of course not, are you kidding? I'm actually doing some optimizations as we speak with
the whole setup. I've been having some fun trying to tune some other stuff like linear advance.
I'm also determining feed rate-- Not the feed rate, I'm sorry, but jerk speed,
stuff like that. It's a whole process, it is going to take a little while. The point is,
the couplers, woohoo, the couplers work really well. I've been printing for the last, gosh,
like 10 hours now and I haven't had any problems in terms of feeding filament.
Retractions are not an issue. Feeding filaments is not an issue. These couplers work, they do.
They work perfectly well on this heat sink. I think the proof of concept is there.
Now then, if we can get more people to really test this out and get a good
data set, a good sample size, I think this might be, if you're using a Bowden setup like I am,
the best routes to go down if you're trying to secure that Bowden too.
There's definitely things that I need to optimize, but it's definitely a thing
and it's definitely something I can optimize. Thanks for watching guys. If you're interested
in these things, maybe leave a comment down below. Who knows, perhaps, Micro Swiss might
stumble upon this video. If they see that there is a lot of public interest, you never know.