RapidChange Revo is E3D’s new hotend eco system. As the name RapidChange already suggests – one of the main advertised features of Revo is the ease and convenience of nozzle changes because no tools are needed, and it can and should be done, while the hotend is cold. But E3D did more than this because they also integrated components to make the system more compact, capable, reliable and safe. Their heater cores for example combine the heater block, a heating element, and the thermistor. The new dual material nozzle breaks combine a brass nozzle with a thin, stainless steel tube as heatbreak, eliminating the need for hot tightening and preventing material leaks. I’ve been thoroughly testing Revo for several hundreds of hours with excellent prints, failed hardware and very interesting discoveries during my performance and in-depth thermal tests!

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The Mekanika EVO is not my first CNC router. One of the reasons why this channel exists is actually a wooden CNC router I built more than 8 years back. I later upgraded to an aluminum framed machine, and now Mekanika sent me their latest CNC router for this review. As a disclaimer – Mekanika sent me the machine free of charge, but they didn’t influence the review process in any way. Mekanika is not new to the CNC Market, and they have been selling their Mekanika Pro routers since 2019, as well as a screen printing device. The EVO, which we’ll be taking a look at today, was financed right around a year ago in a, in my opinion, very legitimate Kickstarter campaign and has shipped all of the machines from the campaign until the end of last year. The EVO builds on the design of their Pro machines and primarily is a more affordable option with simpler motion components. It comes in three different sizes from the S that has a working area of 600x600mm and costs 2700€ excluding tax to the L that can machine parts with the size of one meter by one meter and costs 4000€. The missing tax in their shop already shows that this machine is aimed more towards businesses. It’s definitely not cheap but still in a similar price range as comparable machines on the market and with that target group. I – heavy-hearted – chose the smallest version of the three simply because I didn’t have the space for a bigger one. The name EVO by the way, comes from the possibility to upgrade the machine to a Pro version with an upgrade kit. Mekanika said that this would be available at the end of last year, but I haven’t seen anything in their store yet.

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Let me quickly tell you the story of how I came up with my non-planar 3D printing idea. Some of you might know that I’ve got an adorable 1.5-year-old daughter and as a caring dad with a 3D printer, I, of course, wanted to print something for her. The idea was to make her a ball run that I could easily attach to a window. The tube sections I wanted to make are pretty tall parts and I’m usually impatient and want quick results. Printing high parts conventionally often takes quite a long time, so I use the spiral vase mode when I usually print vases or stuff like that. Here, the printhead moves in a very shallow but continuous spiral around the outside of a model. This is great because it’s quick, but it also usually leaves you with pretty tough parts. Designing parts for vase mode is an art, and I’m always super impressed if RC airplane designers like 3DLabPrint manage to create whole airplanes that can be printed as a single, closed contour with barely any travel moves to minimize oozing so you can print them with Light Weight, Foaming PLA.

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Vielen Dank, dass Du unseren Originalen Volcano Adapter gekauft hast. Mit diesem kleinen aber vielseitigen Teil kannst Du nicht nur viel Geld sparen, sondern auch deutlich mehr aus Deinem Volcano Hotend holen!

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Thanks for buying our Original Volcano Adapters. Using these small but versatile parts can not only save you a ton of money but enables you to get more out of your Volcano Hotend.

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There are a ton of filaments for 3D printing on the market that advertise themselves as being biodegradable or compostable. If you do more research, you’ll find that most of them, especially PLA, will only biodegrade on industrial composts, but what happens if you put some of these materials in a regular garden compost pile that many of us have at home? There have been other videos on that topic by Hobbyhoarder and recently Angus from Makers Muse, but I think my real-life test and the materials I used will add quite a bit to the discussion!

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PET bottles are something I’m sure all of us have at our homes. But did you know that you can quite simply recycle one of these bottles into usable filament without the need for complicated and expensive shredders and extrusion systems? Pull-trusion is a method that I’ve been hearing more and more about of over the last year. Pultrusion means that you take a PET bottle, slice it into a long strip using a simple fixture with a razor blade, and then just pull this tape through a slightly modified 3D printer hotend and get ready to use filament out of it! This process got me pretty excited, and at the end of summer last year, Joshua Tailor sent me a beautiful package with some samples made from different bottles. I highly appreciate his input on this process and permitting me to use some of his footage here.

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I showed this fantastic-looking dual-color filament in a recent video that has recently popped up at quite some vendors here in Europe and the US. When you print this material, you end up with different colors on your part depending on the angle and side you look at it. The filament itself is made by co-extrusion, so using two extruders that feed into a special die, out of which you get a filament strand that’s half one and half another color. During printing, the filament flows in a laminar way through the hotend, and because there is no turbulence, it comes out of the small printer orifice, just as it went in.

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I showed in a recent video how I was able to increase the melting performance of my 3D printer and, therefore, the possible printing speed by replacing my standard brass nozzle with Bondtechs CHT nozzle, which can melt materials way more efficiently with a special internal structure. If you want to know more about the Core Heating Technology, please check out that video! In the end, I concluded that volcano hotends are obsolete because just changing a simple nozzle improves your machine’s performance more than switching to a longer and heavier volcano hotend.

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