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Article Snap to it! With MatX and Scaffold Snap Following the success of spoolWorks Scaffold and Edge, we're proud to bring you our newest optimised filament pairing: MatX and Scaffold Snap MatX is a drop-in-replacement for ABS applications that provides generally improved properties across the board, with increased layer adhesion and a much improved surface finish. Where ABS prints to a dull gloss, MatX has a lovely shiny satin finish. Due to its exceptional flow properties MatX offers highly accurate printing, making it a great material for printing detailed parts with tiny nozzles, right down to our 0.15mm nozzles. As an added bonus, it offers about ten times the weathering resistance and resistance to ultraviolet radiation of ABS, higher long-term heat resistance, and resistance to chemicals like cleaning products. [caption id="attachment_365" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Yes that is a tiny, tiny vase[/caption] Scaffold Snap is a new, easy-to-use support material for desktop 3D printing, designed to work perfectly with MatX. These guys go together like peas and carrots, as the saying goes, but to delve into why this is requires a little bit of a chemistry lesson. Bear with us, there are pictures: MatX (an abbreviation of 'Material X' - MatX's original super-secret pre-release name that somehow stuck) is an ASA-based material composed of little particle-balls of acrylate rubber bound with an acrylonitrile-styrene copolymer chain matrix. Snap is styrene-based support material. [caption id="attachment_368" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Snap is the wind beneath MatX's wings[/caption] Whereas the copolymer chains of MatX are long, tough and strong, the styrene chains in Snap are short. This makes Snap quite a weak, brittle material that produces easily crushed and removable supports. This is a significant difference from conventional HIPS (High-impact Polystyrene) which is tough, impact resistant and hard to break away. Snap is a very high-flow material which prints smoothly, allowing you to print perfect support structures alongside MatX (and other styrenic materials like ABS too!) [caption id="attachment_369" align="aligncenter" width="300"] You can't see it in this picture, but the styrene molecules are holding hands.[/caption] Snap has none of the cross-linking and crystallisation difficulties that plague PVA-based support materials like Scaffold, and can be left in a hot idle nozzle for long periods without causing blockages. This makes it ideal for home dual-extrusion printers like the Ultimaker 3 (but more on that later). [caption id="attachment_370" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Styrene molecules love other styrene molecules...[/caption] When printed alongside MatX, the two materials adhere together, with Snap firmly supporting MatX. The styrene molecules in Snap form a weak but effective bond with the acrylonitrile-styrene of MatX, meaning that they print cohesively. [caption id="attachment_371" align="aligncenter" width="300"] ...but they break up as easily as teenagers[/caption] Once the print is complete, Snap cools back to its clear, hard, brittle state and can be broken and peeled away from MatX. Snap breaks rather like weak glass, shattering into fine, almost powder-like shards* that can easily be removed from the print. The MatX-Snap interface bond breaks cleanly and easily. This means smoother underside-surfaces on prints that have been built on Snap supports, as the two materials can be printed closely upon each other yet still break away cleanly. Because Snap breaks into small fine fragments it can even be removed from hard to reach places that would normally only be possible with soluble supports, although you do still need to be able to reach the material with a tool or similar in order to fragment and extract it. This puts even more complex, beautiful geometries within reach. Snap makes for a much quicker support material removal process than soluble or traditional supports. Once parts are cooled and off the printer the material can be shattered and peeled away in just a few minutes. None of the mess and waiting of soluble supports, and none of the laborious picking and cutting of conventional supports. Print, crush, peel - done. [caption id="attachment_364" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Print yourself a nice smooth table for your frog.[/caption] To test just how easy MatX and Snap are to print together, we used a human guinea-pig in the form of Elzabi, our digital marketing assistant, who had never tried 3D printing with support when we gave her a spool of MatX, a spool of Snap, and an Ultimaker 3 to play with. Essentially we wanted to see if someone comfortable with, but by no means expert in, 3D printing could use these materials without too much trouble. For her first attempt she simply loaded the two materials onto the printer, used the default support settings in Cura, and hit 'print'. The results were surprisingly decent - the materials worked together, but adhered too strongly. This meant that the supports couldn't be pulled off, and had to be crushed to a powder to remove completely. Far more effort than we were happy with! The next few tries involved getting to grips with some of those settings that Cura automatically hides, working to get the perfect formula for a satisfying snap and easy peel-away. The resulting slicer profile is available through our wiki, but is essentially as simple as: Lowering the support infill density Using a support infill pattern like 'concentric' or 'zig-zag' Adding, and then increasing the size of, a support interface with a grid pattern Lowering the support interface density to between 50% and 75% Slightly increasing support X/Y distance and prioritizing it over Z distance Everything else was more or less cosmetic fiddling that varied depending on the model to be printed. *which can be sharp! We highly recommend wearing gloves and safety goggles while breaking it away from your prints. It really, really does SNAP! As an added extra-special bonus, our tests reveal that Scaffold Snap even works with spoolWorks Edge, a PETG-based filament. Now you truly can print ALL the things. [caption id="attachment_366" align="aligncenter" width="300"] The proof is in the Yoda.[/caption]
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Article Open Source, Design Patents, and E3D Recently we’ve been taking another look at how we license our products here at E3D. There’ve been a few questions about licensing and what it means to be open-source as a hardware manufacturer, so we wanted to state our position clearly and openly for the benefit of all involved. The current process: E3D currently registers designs for most of its products under what in the EU is called an “EU Community Registered Design.” In the US this is what’s called a “Design Patent.” They are slightly different legal concepts but effectively fulfil the same purpose of letting the world know that we’ve designed a Thing. These are not full blown patents (legally known as “Utility Patents”) of the type that patent an idea or concept. Instead, a registered design/design patent protects the “cosmetic appearance” of a product and prevents others from making and selling exact replicas. This was intended to help us remove clones that violated the Creative Commons Non-Commercial (CC-NC) license that we had used previously. Moving forwards: Recently we have decided to move more towards fully open source design. As such we’ve completely open sourced the E3D-v6 and have released the designs under the Open Source Hardware (OSHW)-compatible General Public Licence (GPL), finally making the E3D V6 a well and truly and open source product. While not every one of our products is included at this time, we are reconsidering licenses for a range of products and we expect to be applying the GPL to many more of our products going forward. The recently-released Titan Aero, for example, is GPL licensed. After all, we're confident that what makes an E3D product truly worthwhile is more than just its schematics. Not only are our products manufactured with quality materials to a high standard on modern machinery, followed by a rigorous testing and QC procedure on each batch. Every single one of our heat breaks is individually checked and cleaned by hand, and we offer long-term customer service and support that is hard to find elsewhere. Buying an E3D product also means you are supporting continued innovation in the form of R&D for future E3D products. And Haribo. What is GPL? A GPL is built around maintaining design freedom. It offers the freedom for users to modify, tinker, and recreate hardware. However, a GPL also has the aim of protecting users from having the freedom to modify hardware taken away. Under a GPL licence, everyone is free to use and change our GPL-licensed product designs, and even sell the resulting creations. However in order to comply with the GPL, they must also make these re-worked designs open source. From now on, for our GPL licensed products, the only use of our design rights would be against those who are not complying with the terms of the GPL license. This gives us a concrete way to enforce the open source license, which is often hard to enforce on its own (try explaining to eBay that someone is violating a clause of an open source license and should be taken down - it’s nearly impossible!). What we promise: Going forward, E3D products that have both an EU ‘Community Registered Design’ and/or a US ‘Design Patent’ AND a GPL assigned to them, the GPL takes precedence and GPL'd products are truly open-source hardware. Unlike some other entities which have made wishy washy promises of maybe-probably not enforcing patents for those they interpret as 'acting in good faith', E3D is making a legally binding promise to not enforce design rights on those who comply with the terms of the GPL. Those products we apply a GPL to are absolutely and unequivocally open source. So what does this mean in practical terms? • Those selling derivative or cloned products must host and release their own source, even if there are no changes from our source. We consider engineering drawings and CAD to be the “source” in this case. • Those selling derivative or cloned products may not use our trademarks anywhere on their products, listings, descriptions etc. This includes “E3D” as well as the names of our products (e.g ‘Titan’). Our source does not include the occasional embossed version of our trademark or logos (such as the E3D logo on the Titan casing). Derivatives and clones must not replicate our trademarks on their products. • The same goes for copyrighted material such as product images and descriptions. These are not acceptable to duplicate without authorisation. TL;DR: Go forth! Create, re-create, and modify! But don’t rip us off, please.
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Article Introducing T-Fill: Proper British tea from E3D At E3D we work hard to push the limits of what's capable with at-home 3D printing. With our range of professional and experimental filaments we go beyond what's expected in material extrusion. T-Fill™ is not only the next step in filament innovation, but a loving homage to our homeland. As proud as we are of having a global customer base, there's something about England's clear, blue skies and delicate untouched beauty that cannot fail to delight. T-Fill combines two of our greatest joys: high-quality professional-grade 3D printing filament, and tea. We've taken pains to source the very best in local produce. We choose our tea from the green fields of Oxfordshire, the perfect tea-growing climate. We then dry the tea and delicately grind it into a fine powder. Traditional tea companies may scoff at this use of tea 'dust' but that is only because they're jealous and have to use 'tea strainers' or 'tea bags'. These primitive implements use a mesh to prevent leaves remaining in the cup once the tea is brewed. They are unable to grind their tea as finely as we do as it would escape the mesh and create a highly 'dusty' cup of tea. With T-Fill™, these concerns are a thing of the past. We suspend the ground tea leaves in food-grade plastic, which is then extruded into ready-to-use spools of filament. The result is as simple as it is effective. Simply 3D print yourself a cup of T-Fill™, pour in boiling water and in a few minutes you will have a fresh cup of tea that tastes like nothing you've ever had before. Nothing could be easier or faster. T-Fill™ is available from Saturday April 1st, 2017. Enjoy! And now introducing SugarFull™! Filament 100% comprised of fine sugar, so that you can print your own sugar cubes!
Latest From E3d
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Article Titan Aero: What do you get if you cross a Titan with a V6? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfpvm9z28Qk&w=560&h=315 Since smashing into the world of extruders with Titan back in March 2016 the next logical step for E3D was to integrate a Hot End into it, compress it as much as possible and make an ultra-compact all-in-one extruder and hotend. As with the original Titan, we came up with some design objectives before cracking on with prototyping. This helped us to work out exactly what we wanted to achieve with our new hot-end-extruder-thing: Objectives Make it as small as possible, particularly in the Z direction in order to squeeze out as much extra build height as possible. Be compatible with the current Titan design, so that those with a Titan can simply upgrade their Hot End. We really didn’t want to force customers to buy a whole new product when the original is a perfectly good piece of kit! We don't want to be one of those companies that launches a product and then makes you buy an upgrade which shares a large amount of components 6 months later. Be compatible with the V6 and Volcano ecosystem of nozzles, sensors and heaters, maintaining all the customisation options that are available. Be all metal in design, with comparable performance to a V6 HotEnd. Anything less than accurate, reliable extrusion of any thermoplastic would have been a compromise we weren’t willing to make. Keep the filament path as short and constained as possible. This leads to a more responsive extruder with cleaner starts and stops and, by extension, better print quality. Reducing the driven length of filament in the system reduces lag induced by the flexing and compressing of the filament. This is especially beneficial for flexible filaments due to their compressibility. The Result This is the Titan Aero. An aluminium heatsink that replaces the lid of the Titan, giving you all the performance of a V6 (and then some!). It also takes a standard V6 threaded heatbreak, so retains full membership to the V6 ecosystem. The first thing to note is how compact Aero is. At 25mm shorter than a Titan and V6, it allows you to squeeze out every last bit of build volume from your printer. It also has a very short length of filament between the hobb and the nozzle tip. ‘But why is this important?’ you may ask. The short answer is that it makes the extruder more responsive and better at extruding all materials but especially flexibles. The long answer takes a little more explanation: Imagine the filament in the extruder as a spring. As you start to extrude it compresses a little, storing pressure. While this is happening not all the force from the extruder is felt at the nozzle tip. Visibly what this means is that extrusion commences gradually, rather than immediately starting. Conversely, when you finish extruding this stored pressure is released and the nozzle continues to extrude. Ie: it oozes. As you are starting and stopping multiple times per layer these effects become visible, often as a seam up the side of the print. However, if as with the Titan Aero you reduce the length of filament, there is less material to compress and hence the extruder starts and stops more quickly. This results in better print quality with all filaments, with the results amplified the more flexible a filament is. However it’s not only good for flexibles, it is a full metal HotEnd like a V6 and can also dissipate a similar amount of heat, so can print any thermoplastic you choose. We’ve put a bunch of different filaments through the Aero and found that it could handle anything we threw at it, including high temperature engineering plastics. Not only did it print everything we tried but we got nice clean and precise prints whilst doing so, thanks to the responsiveness of the extruder. Titan Aero is incredibly rigid as the HotEnd is compact and firmly screwed to the extruder body. This means your extruder can accurately follow your motion systems movements, regardless of how fast it accelerates. A more rigid setup is also more resistant to potential collisions with a print (for example in the case of an errant curled-up overhang), making the system more reliable as well. Titan Aero makes use of the 3:1 gearing of the orginal Titan, enabling you to use less powerful motors, down to 21Ncm of torque without compromising reliability. Compared to a typical 40Ncm motor for an ungeared extruder this saves you 135g of weight, meaning you can turn up your printer’s acceleration and print faster without the machine shaking itself to death. Aero also retains Titan’s smart usability features, meaning it is simple to mount, load and unload filament, manually extrude, adjust idler tension, and clean out debris from the hobb. The Process The most challenging part of this project was to achieve performance equivalent to a V6. A lot of work has gone into optimising the V6, making its heatsink really effective at dissipating heat. We managed this by running simulations from the very early stages of design, allowing us to tweak the fin geometry and find a sweet spot where we get maximum cooling. However even the best simulation is meaningless without real-world testing to back it up. Luckily Santa was really generous last Christmas and gave us some new toys to let us do more complex prototyping in-house, allowing us to iteratively improve our design. We started with a foam model just to see how it all went together before going to functional aluminium prototypes. We tested the prototypes extensively to see how far we could push their capabilities.The Aero managed to print any plastic we put through it. We also tested reliability. We weren’t really expecting this to be an issue as the Aero is based on Titan, an extruder itself designed for reliability that has been proven with over 15,000 hours’ use in our print farm. In turn we’ve already run the Aero for around 1500 hours without issue. Content with reliability in normal operating conditions we decided to try and find the limits of its thermal performance, as the behaviour of the heatsink was what was most likely to be different to V6. Our test was to stick the Aero in an enclosed print volume where the ambient temperature got up to 35 degrees celsius (about 95°F for our American friends) and get it to print with PLA. PLA has a very low softening temperature (65°C), so to printing it in a warm chamber requires a very efficient heat sink or it will jam. Even in this strenuous environment, the Titan Aero performed perfectly. We then took things a step further and tried printing with the heatsink heavily enclosed by the carriage it was mounted on compromising airflow and heat dissapation. In this case that it was a indeed little more prone to jamming due to overheating, however if you are aware of this it can be easily avoided by making sure you mount the Aero on a carriage that allows for good airflow into the fan and out of the heatsink. Art Being a forward-looking company we looked into all kinds of colourful 'branding' and 'design' nonsense during the manufacturing process. At one point we even looked into anodizing the heat sink to a bright green, but in the end we went for something more clean and classical-looking. The final design of Titan Aero looks nice. Really nice. Its pleasing compact design has a raw aluminium finish for that professional CNC-machined look. It's also very shiny. We looked extensively into getting the most fancy-pants fans possible. Blue fans would match the logo, but LED-lit fans added a pretty spectacular level of bling. In the end we decided that might be a little... overstated and went with translucent fans that allow you to see the machinery within. Summary Looking back at our design objectives and how they were realised we can say that Titan Aero is: A combination of some of the best parts of Titan and V6. It is reliable, robust, easy to use, and can print any thermoplastic. Fully compatible with the E3D ecosystem. This means that if you want to upgrade any part of it (nozzles, blocks, sensors, etc) then you can! Compact, especially in the Z direction, allowing you to get the most out of your printer’s build volume. The extruder with one of the shortest filament paths available, giving you a responsive extruder and cleaner prints. Perfectly suited to printing flexible filaments, while not being limited to only flexibles! Availability We have Titan Aero on the shelves, ready to go both as an upgrade for those who already have a Titan and V6, and also as a 12V or 24V full kit with everything you need to get printing. Also available in a mirrored version. Mount a standard and mirrored Titan Aero side by side to maximise print volume. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIZCfnRanSk&w=560&h=315 ALSO INTRODUCING the Mirrored Titan Extruder. Get the most out of dual extruding with Titan and V6 with the Mirrored Titan.
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RT @3D_METACAD: Gotta give this @E3DOnline #scaffold #pvasupport credit. Top job doesn't block. https://t.co/jVrrpZ6gpq
3 hours ago
By E3D Online
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Heavy traffic kinda knocked us over yesterday, but it *should* now be safe to check out the new E3D site! https://t.co/cdvh9JsVbr
3 days ago
By E3D Online
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Titan Aero: The new 2 in 1 extruder and Hot End from E3D!
What people are saying
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My take on the E3D Titan Aero! by Tom Sanladerer
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New E3D Titan (Mirrored) and Titan Aero
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Talking Titan Aero: Sanjay and Rory discuss the latest E3D release
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Filastruder reviews spoolWorks Edge 3D Filament Review
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