When will you ship my stuff?
Its been yet another busy week.
We're past 36% of preorders for compact. We've also taken time to ship out (in order) backordered Air, Conduction, and Giga kits (we're not done yet, but getting close, and will have stock again)
For Compacts, We're keeping rough pace with the other US distribution, but the last international distributor packages went out today on their way over the pond.
Every single package that we've sent out has slowly lifted the weight off our shoulders and brought a bit of light back into our lives as we head into the colder months.
Whats next?
In the meantime, we're continuing to make new parts & future products. For those large-filament lovers, you might want to pay attention to our store in the coming months :)
Boots for mainline Chube are underway as well. No promise date.
Lodestone beds are something I'm hoping to get cutting on our mill in the next few weeks as well. Our mill is set up and is in great shape, and I'll be testing out the pipeline that I've created, which actually can take your order, export it as a JSON, which I can then feed into our solidworks plugin, which will generate the model, then the CAM, then the Gcode which will run our machine, all ideally without a human inbetween.
We have a few other exciting projects that are too soon to discuss more, but expect something new in November for reveal at Formnext!
I also wanted to share fun use cases for 3d printing that is just a simple, efficient solution to issues we have :)
First, a short video showing off our ejection pin adapter for thin-wall tubing
This greatly increases the success rate of ejections which save time and keep the machine operational. Otherwise ,would have to rig up a very annoying solution with tape or buying a custom pusher, etc.
Second, same project, end-caps for tubing to prevent oil from falling out!
Yea yea, we could use cork stoppers, but these custom-made caps work pretty well with some cheap o-rings.
They are re-usable and have survived several bars!
For those who have recieved and are about to recieve their compacts:
A few customers have raised concerns about the melt zone on their units, based on ad-hoc tests like pushing cold filament through the empty bore. I want to address this plainly so you can install your hotend and enjoy printing.
Whether cold filament passes through the bore has no effect on how the hotend performs. Sizing that section close to nominal filament diameter is intentional and has real advantages.
Here's how we know:
- Our beta testers ran similarly sized bores with no issues.
- We have 1,000+ Pika hotends in the field with the same conditions.
- The bore from the heatbreak into the heatblock is designed to step down, with a transition zone into the smaller melt chamber.
- We ran a direct A/B test to confirm and saw no difference in flow rate or print quality with identical G-code.
The left tower is from the smaller-bore hotend. The test used Zyltech ABS at 280 °C, a low-current LGX heavyLITE, and a 0.4 mm hardened steel nozzle. The only variable was the Chube heatblock: one that let cold filament pass and one that didn't. The printed parts showed no visible difference. (The chamber wasn't preheated for either test, so excuse the warping.)
On pressure advance
- A melt zone sized close to the filament likely improves PA, because there's a tighter relationship between the filament being pushed or pulled and the molten plastic in the heatblock. That's one reason we size the heatblock this way.
- We saw no print differences between the two hotends, and the smaller bore didn't cause any unusual PA behavior. For reference, even the largest bore we tested between Chube, Compact, and Pika is smaller than the internal bore of most V6 nozzles.
Cold pulls in my experience aren't common on UHF hotends, but bore size here won't change how one behaves.
To continue to speak simply: if there's a real, demonstrable problem, we'll fix it quickly. That's always been our policy. But all the evidence so far says these small variations wouldn't be noticed in normal use. Install it, print with it, and if something's wrong, open a ticket.
