The Copperhead Hot End Promises to Eliminate Heat Creep
Heat creep can cause 3D printing headaches, and the new Copperhead hot end promises to reduce it as much as is physically possible.
While consumer 3D printers today are certainly far more reliable than they were just a few years ago, there is still an awful lot that can go wrong. 3D printing is a sensitive process, and even small issues can cause your print to turn out poorly or fail completely. Extrusion is where most problems occur, and your 3D printer’s hot end is often the culprit. Heat creep in particular can cause all kinds of headaches, and the new Copperhead hot end from Slice Engineering promises to reduce heat creep as much as is physically possible.
The Copperhead hot end recently launched on Kickstarter, and the campaign has now reached more than half of its funding goal. Unlike many companies who have started Kickstarter campaigns, this isn’t Slice Engineering’s first product. They have already been selling their Mosquito and Mosquito Magnum hot ends for a while, and they have been very well-reviewed. The new Copperhead builds on the Mosquito’s engineering, specifically on the thermal transfer properties that help it eliminate the heat creep problems that are so common among hot ends.
In an ideal world, your heater cartridge would heat up the heater block of your 3D printer’s hot end, then the nozzle and the tube just before the nozzle—but not any further. In reality, most hot end designs allow that heat to continue upwards, which causes the filament to melt and expand before it should. After it cools, the filament can harden in the tube and cause a clog. That is called heat creep, and the Copperhead hot end prevents it from happening with a unique hot end design that keeps heat from traveling past the heat break that separates the area that should be hot from the area that shouldn’t be.
It achieves that with a bimetallic design. A hardened stainless steel surgical tubing with very thin—just 0.23mm—walls runs through the length of the hot end. The top and bottom are both surrounded by copper alloy with a very high thermal conductivity, but those two chunks of copper don’t touch. That means heat can only be transferred conductively through the thin steel that has poor thermal conductivity. What little heat does cross the heat break is then diffused by the upper copper heat sink.
The Copperhead hot end comes in a number of styles to fit your extruder setup. In many cases, you’ll only need the tube itself (without the heat sink). If that isn’t possible for your 3D printer, you can replace the entire hot end assembly, which includes the heat sink, heater cartridge, cooling fan, and nozzle. You can back the Kickstarter campaign until January 1st, 2020. The hot end alone costs $49, while the full package with some swag is $149. Rewards are expected to be delivered in March of 2020.