Using Stratasys Fortus Tips with A Reprap?

So I currently work at an additive manufacturing facility and my interest in 3D printing has led me to begin a personal project of building a Prusa Mendel. I mainly work with PolyJet machines, but the company that I work for also has 8 Fortus FDM printers made by Stratasys. These machines are running 24/7 and the tips (normally 10/1000) are are routinely discarded and replaced due to slight wear and tear. Since these tips are usually still in fairly good condition and I could get a great deal of them for free, I am considering making use of them in my RepRap project. I am wondering if anyone has already designed an extruder compatible with these tips or has any suggestions on how to do so.

Thanks

Post a few clear pics so people can make a suggestion of how to reuse the nozzles.

Quote
unicornswag
So I currently work at an additive manufacturing facility and my interest in 3D printing has led me to begin a personal project of building a Prusa Mendel. I mainly work with PolyJet machines, but the company that I work for also has 8 Fortus FDM printers made by Stratasys. These machines are running 24/7 and the tips (normally 10/1000) are are routinely discarded and replaced due to slight wear and tear. Since these tips are usually still in fairly good condition and I could get a great deal of them for free, I am considering making use of them in my RepRap project. I am wondering if anyone has already designed an extruder compatible with these tips or has any suggestions on how to do so.

Thanks

is there a screw thread? what size?

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Yes, you can reuse them. The tips by themselves (with the tube) don't have the heater built into them (unless they also discard the heating element at the same time). The Fortus machines use 1.75mm filament and normally have a .35mm nozzle tip, which is pretty standard sizes for RepRap machines. Stratasys does have a patent on the "thinwall tube" design that is their feed tube / nozzle design, but apart from that, it is nothing special. Stratasys recommends that Fortus users regularly discard the tips every so many cartriges (some ridiculously low number of kgs of material) so most of the users do just that regardless of whether it needs to be replaced or not.

It would be easy enough to make a heating block out of a scrap piece of brass or aluminum and mount a 40 watt heater cartridge or 24 watt 6 ohm resistor into a drilled out hole.

Probably more important, is what your employer does with the leftover material in the Fortus cartridges??? They leave a LOT of leftover material in each cartridge when the machine tells you the cartridge is used up. FREE material is a much bigger bonus. With 8 machines running 24/7, you could get more than enough scrapped material to make all of us drool.