It's been a long time since I 3D printed. My printer's hot end was leaking and I had to deal with the distributor about it and ended up with a credit but no replacement hot ends were in stock. A few months later I saw they had some in stock so I ordered them.

I cut most of the filament off, but you can see this thing leaks like mad. These leaks cause inconsistencies in the prints. I dragged my feet fixing it because this particular printer has a proprietary connector that powers the hot end. Normally you buy a hot end and screw the bare wires into a controller board.

In this case I can't, because of this special cable. You can buy the entire cable assembly with a hot end, but it is a lot more expensive and I already modified it for a custom fan assembly with two expensive Noctua fans. I didn't want to abandon it or start over. I looked around for ideas on how to solve this problem and the one that looked best was using XT-60 connectors that are typically used with RC car batteries. I am concerned with everything I use with 3D printers as many of the Chinese knock offs are vulnerable to fire.

In fact, the Ender 3 uses these connectors and they have been known to burn up due to cheap versions of the connectors.

_Source

This is what happens when you use cheap components with 3D printers. These XT-60 connects were stock from the manufacturer of the printer and they still burned up because they were cheapo connectors that didn't support the rated 60 amps.

You can see the replacement hot end is just bare wires, and the two red ones are high current so I don't want to mess around with cheap components. I made sure I got some high quality XT-60 connectors you can see here.

Installing these are really easy if you have four hands, because soldering them requires two to hold the connector in place, one for the soldering iron and one for the solder.

The final job isn't perfect because I only have two hands, but I am happy with the results and ready to re-install my hot end.

I will need to do a lot of calibrating and test prints before I can start on anything serious, but I have been wanting to get printing again. I really want to pick up a Prusa as these are much better than the clones in terms of reliability and features. It's like going from a Hyundai to a BMW.

I want to make some fun prints like this for my friends.

_Source

Or a custom homemade Nerf gun

_Source

---

Securely chat with me on Keybase

Why you should vote me as witness