Toolhead choices and Components finalized !

Alright, i started working on this again today after a lot of procrastination ! I did a LOT of research off-cam and on-cam by watching youtube videos, and opening up like 20 different toolheads in onshape to see how they fit together - kudos to the EVA 3 docs for being so easy to understand and giving a good visualization of how things fit together !

What did i do ?

Today i finalized my component list (again).

I needed to choose a extruder, hotend, probe, and cooling method for both the hotend and the extruded filament !

I did a lotta research, and have now decided on what i will use !

Shoutout to @anicetus for writing his 3dp design guide and for helping me out !

What i decided on :

Bowden or direct drive ?

There are really only 2 options for the filament path of a 3d printer - bowden or direct drive.

direct drive is duh driving the filament directly into the printhead - so the extruder is part of the toolhead.

Bowden means the extruder is mounted somewhere on the frame and extrudes filament into the printhead with a “bowden tube” - this makes the printhead lighter => faster, but increases the chance of something going wrong.

Since ive never worked with a 3dp b4 and this is my first one, im going with direct drive as its a lot more reliable !

The Extruder

Im going with a Sherpa mini - i want something lightweight since im using direct drive and this will sit on the toolhead, and the sherpa mini uses a NEMA 14 pancake motor, so much lighter than other options

The hotend

I initially thought id use a tz e3 because @anicetus recommended it to me, and he has good experience with it (its cheap too), but in the end i think ill go with the phaetus dragon HF hotend - this one has a faster flow rate and is stabler as it has a 4 hole mounting method instead of just 2, and because the tz e3 was initially meant to be a ender 3 drop-in - (ender 3 is a very common 3d printer from creality)

Cooling

Alright, so i need two types of cooling

For this part i just used the recommendations from ani’s guide, since i didn’t have much knowledge of this and hes and expert - why question him, he hasn’t failed me till now (and never will, if your reading this, love you dude )

For part cooling (cools filament after its been deposited on to the build plate) im using 2 5015 blower fans - i know part cooling isnt strictly required for a 3dp, but no printer ever comes without it - id be pretty cooked without

I also need a fan to cool my hotend, for this im going with a 3015 heatsink fan :D

Whats next ?

Next up is actually designing the toolhead - for this part im not gonna do it completely from scratch - im going to make my own version of some popular toolhead designs !

I think i could probably frankenstein together different aspects of different toolheads - i like how compact and easy to assemble EVA is, love the intuitive cooling of the Mantis toolhead, like the looks of the dragonburner, and also like the archetype mounting method.

I have already imported a bunch of toolheads into my Onshape, and will probably experiment a lot next - lets see where this goes !

Btw ive already been working on frankensteing/designing this toolhead but its not ready to present yet