Thanks for buying our Original Volcano Adapters. Using these small but versatile parts can not only save you a ton of money but enables you to get more out of your Volcano Hotend.

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There are a ton of filaments for 3D printing on the market that advertise themselves as being biodegradable or compostable. If you do more research, you’ll find that most of them, especially PLA, will only biodegrade on industrial composts, but what happens if you put some of these materials in a regular garden compost pile that many of us have at home? There have been other videos on that topic by Hobbyhoarder and recently Angus from Makers Muse, but I think my real-life test and the materials I used will add quite a bit to the discussion!

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PET bottles are something I’m sure all of us have at our homes. But did you know that you can quite simply recycle one of these bottles into usable filament without the need for complicated and expensive shredders and extrusion systems? Pull-trusion is a method that I’ve been hearing more and more about of over the last year. Pultrusion means that you take a PET bottle, slice it into a long strip using a simple fixture with a razor blade, and then just pull this tape through a slightly modified 3D printer hotend and get ready to use filament out of it! This process got me pretty excited, and at the end of summer last year, Joshua Tailor sent me a beautiful package with some samples made from different bottles. I highly appreciate his input on this process and permitting me to use some of his footage here.

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I showed this fantastic-looking dual-color filament in a recent video that has recently popped up at quite some vendors here in Europe and the US. When you print this material, you end up with different colors on your part depending on the angle and side you look at it. The filament itself is made by co-extrusion, so using two extruders that feed into a special die, out of which you get a filament strand that’s half one and half another color. During printing, the filament flows in a laminar way through the hotend, and because there is no turbulence, it comes out of the small printer orifice, just as it went in.

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I showed in a recent video how I was able to increase the melting performance of my 3D printer and, therefore, the possible printing speed by replacing my standard brass nozzle with Bondtechs CHT nozzle, which can melt materials way more efficiently with a special internal structure. If you want to know more about the Core Heating Technology, please check out that video! In the end, I concluded that volcano hotends are obsolete because just changing a simple nozzle improves your machine’s performance more than switching to a longer and heavier volcano hotend.

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I’m usually not the person that shows you the latest super colorful filament, though when the first spool of this stuff landed at my doorstep, I was really intrigued. Robert, who runs RedLine Filaments here in Germany, sent me a message and teased that he’s going to send me something he’s sure I will be trying out right when I get it into my hands. Of course, I was somehow hoping for a cool new toy and was a bit surprised when I only saw two spools of filament. But this filament was different to anything I’ve ever seen available commercially.

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I recently showed you how with Bondtechs CHT nozzle you could almost print three times faster because it can melt filament way more efficiently by splitting it into three strands. The fundamental problem of heating a 3D printing filament is that the polymer conducts heat very slowly. If you print fast, the material is not yet properly heated through before it reaches the nozzle tip. By splitting the material up, you decrease the distance from the heating surface to the center of the material, thus melting it more quickly. Bondtech licensed the core heating technology from 3D Solex for their design and uses a quite sophisticated machining approach to generate the shape. When looking at the patent, you can also see other approaches to heat the filament not only from the outside but also from the inside. One is a simple bar that's perpendicular to the flow direction. Hard to manufacture conventionally, but what happens if we simply stick a piece of wire through a standard nozzle? This is exactly what I did.

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So recently, Key from Kaika sent me a message and asked me if I’d like to take a look at their 3D printing nozzles. I get a ton of these messages and usually decline them since reviewing yet another nozzle with a special coating or alloy isn’t that interesting for me and probably also for you. The thing that excited me here though was that these are Japanese-made nozzles that you can get with an orifice diameter down to 0.1 mm, which is tinier than anything I ever used. Compared to standard 0.4 mm nozzles, this enables you to add way more fine details onto prints, though comes with challenges!

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Regular 3D printing nozzles look all pretty much the same on the inside. There is one drilled hole that’s slightly bigger than your filament diameter that goes almost all the way to the tip at which point the small orifice bore starts that defines your nozzle diameter. There is some slight variation with the cheapest ones just drilled with a standard 118° drill tip. E3D tried to improve on that many years ago with a stepped bore probably to improve internal flow but now uses as many other higher-quality manufacturers a special drill bit with a pointier tip for better flow characteristics. Ultimaker still uses a special stepped geometry in their AA-print cores maybe for less oozing during retracts. Though these are all just slight variations of a simple design.

This right here is Bondtechs new CHT nozzle that features a special core that splits up your filament into three separate channels. CHT means Core Heating Technology which means that the material is not only melted from the outside in, but also from the inside out promising higher melt rates. Bondtech is actually not the one who came up with this idea. Maybe you have already seen the Matchless nozzles from 3DSolex that have been around for a while, though never been particularly popular. Bondtech has now licensed the core heating technology and made their own version of it. They licensed it because it’s unfortunately patented by 3DSolex but I’ll get to that later.

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