Chimera+ is a two-filament, two-nozzle HotEnd designed to print two separate materials. It's capable of handling two-colour prints but really excels when printing parts that require a dedicated support material.
Lets start out with the simpler of the two; Chimera. A Chimera is a mythical beast composed of parts from different creatures. In this case Chimera is composed of parts from both the E3D-v6 HotEnd and the Kraken, along with an air-cooled heatsink that it shares with Cyclops.
Chimera benefits from all the performance advances and reliability tweaks made to the v6 HotEnds. Chimera uses the same interchangeable nozzles as v6 and is therefore compatible with all E3D nozzles from the v6 ecosystem. We’re also using v6 heater blocks which means easy to set up and maintain clamped thermistors, along with fast heat up times from the clamped heater cartridge.
Chimera uses our new milled heatsink which accepts two heatbreaks and cools them with a single 30mm fan. We’re also using the same embedded Bowden couplers from Kraken and v6 to hold in the PTFE tubing that runs right down into the heatbreaks. This makes for an incredibly compact little heatsink with an on-carriage footprint of 30mm x 18mm.
There was no way we were going to use groove mount
for this setup, and because we are CNC milling these parts we had some
nice flexibility in how we arrange the mounting setup. Simple and easy
is best - Chimera mounts with 3 M3 female mounting holes on the top face
for attaching to carriages and end effectors that are in the same plane
as the bed such as Deltas and Mendel type bots.
We’re also
seeing more and more machines with vertically spaced X-Rods like the
Prusa i3 machines, so it made sense to include mounting holes on the
back side of the heatsink so the hotend can just mount flat against the
carriage. The aim here was to make mounting design brain dead simple so
that everyone can easily create an effective mount for this new style of
HotEnd.
One of the most important features of Chimera is how
easy it is to level the two nozzles. The heatbreaks are smooth instead
of threaded and slide easily into carefully toleranced holes in the
heatsink, where they are secured with set screws. This means that each
nozzle can slide up and down a millimeter independently which makes
levelling your nozzles with respect to the bed extremely simple, even if
your printed parts are a touch off.
Chimera makes a
fantastic “mount it and go” setup for dual extrusion using tried and
tested v6 and Kraken technology in a cost effective and compact setup.
We’re really excited to see what people can do with multiple materials
in a single print, soluble and break away supports, as well as multiple
colours.
