Saturday, February 13, 2016

Hot End Assembly

The hot end included in my kit did not have a port drilled in it for the thermistor.


I contacted SeeMeCNC support. They offered to ship me a new one, but also sent me dimensioned drawings so I could drill it out myself. I didn't think it was worth making them deal with shipping a new one when fixing the problem was so easy. I just drilled it out by hand.





Once that was done, I inserted the thermistor and heating resistors, and cemented them in place with high temperature RTV silicone:


One of the forum members recommended threading the thermistor port and using a brass bolt to hold the thermistor in place. This would make it easier to swap the thermistor out if it failed. It seems that thermistor failures are pretty rare, however, and I'm expecting to replace this hot end with an all-metal version within a couple years, which would probably require a thermocouple to handle the higher temperatures, anyway.