Liquid cooled Ender 5 plus

First print print with liquid cooled dual hotent -actually… second - first one failed miserably in a hissing and popping mess due to a coolant leak. Hose strain relief is a must :sob: . Next, I will do some testing with PLA and water soluble support filaments to get the hang of the dual extruder setup before moving to the high temperature stuff, at which point, everything gets enclosed, we mess around with part heating and liquid cooling more components. Klipper definitely makes messing around a lot easier.


1 Like

Is it a commercial design or something you made up yourself?

The hotend is a Triangle Labs Chimera (E3D knock-off) with V6 heat blocks, bi-metal heat breaks, 60W heaters and PT1000 thermistors. The carriage (linear rail) is my design printed from ABS that will be made from aluminum once I’m totally satisfied with it. I’m not sure how the BLtouch will fare at the elevated chamber temperatures, but I have an inductive proximity switch to try (with meatal build plate).

What about the water cooling sustem

Cooling system was originally a Creality unit but I had forgotten to switch from 24v fan supply to 12v supply on the mainboard and cooked the pump and fan circuit on the mainboard :roll_eyes:. Luckily the BTT Manta M8P has plenty of fan ports. I ended up cobbling together a water pump from Amazon (I’ve seen the same pump in several cooling units sold by various vendors) and a radiator with dual fans. This setup ended up being far superior to the Creality unit. I hooked the pump and fans to separate 2-pin fan ports - I set them up in Klipper to both turn on when either or both hotend heaters are activated. The pump has an RPM wire so I hooked that up to the rpm pin on one of the mainboard’s 4-pin fan ports so I can see the pump rpm and have a macro that pauses the print and shuts off the hotend heaters if the pump fails.

image
I got rid of the stock touch screen and installed a BTT mini12864 because I prefer it when doing things like loading filament. The menu.cfg and display.cfg had to be modified for 2 extruders/2 heaters -also added colour options.

that’s a nice setup, Are you looking to print some super high temp filaments with it? or do you have other plans?

Now you have my curiosity up

The plan for this rig is printing the high temp performance plastics. I have an AC bed heater to install and I’m working on a system to direct heat on the part during printing.

First print using both tools. Some tweaking required in Cura for heating/cooling/retracting/changing tools. The printer has completed around 40 hours of printing with a single tool without any issues. :crossed_fingers:

2 Likes

very nice, Do you have the liquid cooling on it now or is that a too come feature?

The liquid cooling has been hooked up and running for a couple of weeks (40hrs of printing). The liquid cooled hotends have been working very well.

gotcha, super clean job, I cannot see the coolant tubes in the hotend assembly at all.

The coolant tubes run up the center of the wiring sleeve. They mount in the center top of the hotend so to prevent any strain at the couplers I ran them straight up the middle.
image

very nice job. I am sure others will ask more about it but I like it.

Printed this toothpaste top for my wife (she has a great sense of humour) using water soluble supports. Makes post processing way easier. I have gotten so used to printing with a direct drive extruder that going back to a bowden setup with all metal heat breaks required some re-learning (you really have to figure out that retraction sweet spot). I added some Oldham couplings to the lead screw nuts.

2 Likes

Slight change in direction. I was not satisfied with the bowden/dual hotend setup. You can’t get enough retraction on hotend switch with an all metal setup to get clean prints. I am going with IDEX and direct drive extruders. While waiting for a few parts to arrive, I installed one print head to do some testing. I am very pleased with the preliminary results. The red part was printed on th



e 5plus at 300mm/s (no input shaping or pressure advance) and the grey part was printed on the K1max at 300mm/s. Both parts are within .002" of my CAD model.

Wow looks phenomenal!

Keep us posted on how the build goes, I am definitely invested in this one.