Hot End Advice: J-nozzle or MakerGear?

I need a new hot end and am wondering what people think of their J-nozzles? I currently have a 0.35mm MakerGear hot end for 1.75mm filament and have been happy with it, but I think I damaged it as it is touchy now. I want a backup hot end and am trying to decide between another MakerGear or the J-nozzle. Any advice in terms of reliability, ease of changing nozzle sizes, etc..?


-Andy P.

I'd check out your extruder and/or hobbed bolt before you blame the hotend and nozzle. Also, I've had problems where not enough heat was leading to slippage and inconsistent feed. Then I had to clean out the teeth on the hobbling, as they were filled with plastic.

Also, if you set your hotend on a low heat (around 80c), you should be able to pull out the filament in a mostly solid state - which will extract any possible nozzle contaminants with it. Chop off that end and re-insert This fixed a previously consistent problem I was having with the Huxley.

I have a 1.75mm makergear with .5mm nozzle if you'd like to use it for elimination troubleshooting.

I took the extruder out and fed it to the hotend by hand. Sometimes it was really easy to feed in by hand and other times it required alot of force. I took the insulation off the hot end and found this (image attached). I emailed the image to Rick Pollack of Makergear after talking to him on the makergear IRC (awesome support by Rick) and he is going to let me know if I can salvage it. My guess is no. I'll probably order another MakerGear hot end with Christmas money . I've been happy with my 0.35mm nozzle and will probably get a 0.5mm nozzle for faster printing, although I don't like the idea of trying to calibrate skeinforge for two different nozzles.

AndyP Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I don't like the idea of trying to calibrate
> skeinforge for two different nozzles.


Just wanted to add: working with multiple profiles is quite easy with skeinforge. I have one for ABS, one for PLA at 80mm/s, PLA at 40mm/s, etc ,etc.

Was even starting to get to the point of using one profile per color of filament, until I realized that the Temperature module was actually doing nothing for my configuration (have yet to look into why).