Slice Engineering Mosquito: A Spectacular Hotend for High-Performance 3D Printers

Normally when we talk about Hotends it is mandatory to take as a reference the most widespread V6 of the well-known component company E3D. But as you can imagine, there are quite a few quality alternatives that improve, and quite a bit, these popular hotends.

Today in 3DWork we will talk a little about a spectacular Hotend designed and manufactured by the famous engineering company Slice Engineering, the Mosquito Hotend.

Thanks in advance to 3D-INFORMATIK for kindly send us a unit to share its further analysis with our community of 3D printing freaks. If you want to be part of it, do not hesitate to join our social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) or to our Telegram.

Brief introduction

Slice Engineering in case you don’t know, is a company made up of a large staff of engineers with the philosophy of re-imagining some of the components that we use daily in all our 3D printers.

And they do it with special emphasis on its design and, of course, without compromising its functionality. All this with machining operations and top quality materials to obtain the best results.

Mosquito Hotend… What’s special?

The Slice Engineering Mosquito is a high performance hotend. This means that it is designed, tested and manufactured to work with virtually any thermoplastic material currently on the 3D printing market.

In addition, it have lot of features that make it one of the most interesting hotends today, and which we will quote:

• Produced to be able to operate without problems with temperatures of up to 500ºC. This obviously allows us to use practically any thermoplastic for 3D printing, such as PEEK or PEI filaments with exceptional mechanical, thermal and chemical properties.
• Completely modular design: This feature will help us allow us to improve or adapt our hotend set to our more specific needs.

• Bi-metal barrel: Improves the thermal breakage of the application by 85%, avoiding possible clogging of our filaments. In addition, it is made of surgical steel, a material with low thermal transmission, and coated with two copper elements that improve thermal dissipation. This feature helps keep the melting zone at a more stable temperature.

• Thanks to its unbeatable design in the fuser block attached to the structure, this allows the nozzle to be changed easily, considerably improving other types of hotends.

• Compact in design: Allows it to be adjusted to practically any comercial or custom printer on the market. Something absolutely necessary for use in multi extrusion systems.
• The structure is made of aeronautical grade aluminum and allows direct mounting of a 25mm fan, in addition to having 5 different hole patterns to be able to adapt to multiple printers.
• Thanks again to its design and excellent construction materials, the final set has a low weight. Ideal to be able to maximize acceleration and speed in X and Y axes allowing the printing of technical grade materials at high speed, maintaining quality and without compromising its precision.
• Use of standard M6 nozzles allows you to use a wide variety of nozzle models on the market, especially those from Slice Engineering for their high quality and the Bondtech CHT that get along wonderfully with the Mosquito

Mosquito Magnum and other versions available

Besides the normal version, Slice Engineering has a Mosquito Magnum version. This variant is focused on even more demanding materials.

Mosquito Magnum includes an extra thermal insulator between the cold zone and the fusion zone made of composite. Thanks to this insulator, it creates a transition zone, which further improves the printing of materials at high temperatures and speed.

Mosquito Magnum may not be suitable for use with low melting temperature materials such as some types of PLA. In addition to the Magnum version Slice Engineering has other versions:

• Mosquito Magnum, improves the printing of materials at high temperatures and speeds up to 30% over the normal version over the original.
• Mosquito Magnum+, is the lastest extension of the Mosquito product line to speeds and improve flow rates from Mosquito Magnum version for the highest performance FDM machines.

• Mosquito Liquid, module that allows the use of liquid cooling as you can see in the following image.

Kit Content

As we have mentioned before, we got our Slice Engineering Mosquito in a store belonging to a colleague of our Telegram, 3D-Informatik. If you are interested, you have the possibility to contact him at this link for any advice on components and/or configurations of your Mosquito.

You can also access their website where you can find this and other components for your 3D printers. The treatment, advice and speed in receiving the material will be excellent.

In our case we opted for the basic Mosquito kit 1.75mm in diameter, although we have the Magnum version that improves the flow rate significantly. However, the normal version with Bondtech CHT nozzles are a great improvement to the flow rate.

The basic kit includes:

• The Mosquito Hotend
• Assembly kit with spare screws and necessary hex keys
• Two lollipops of Orange!!! 😄

3DWork Configuration

We detail the configuration used in our tests:

Hotend	Mosquito 1.75mm Slice Engineering
Heater Cartridge	Slice Engineering 24v 50W
Thermistor/Temperature Probe	Slice Engineering Thermistor 300ºC
Nozzle	Bondtech CHT M6 1.75mm 0.4mm
Thermal Paste	Slice Engineering Boron Nitride Paste

Installation

Slice Engineering has a great documentation that you can find here for the assembly and installation of the different versions of your Mosquito hotend.

The Mosquito is currently one of the most popular Hotends due to its quality and features. Because of this, it is not difficult to find adapters for practically any model or type of 3D printer. As always, you can find many examples on the Thingiverse platform.

Final Assessment

The Slice Engineering Mosquito offers a high-performance hotend, built with the highest quality materials and at a “relatively high price”. Due to this, it is advisable to use it in printers or in cases in which we really take advantage of all its excellent features.

Although the price can be a negative point for certain profiles, if our normal use of our printer is to work with technical materials, with a high price/kg, or abrasives, it is important to have a hotend to match.

We will avoid wasting material on failed prints and save time on problems, and that is where the Mosquito Slice Engineering makes more sense and shows a justification for its cost. If you plan to build or modify your machine to print technical materials or abrasive filaments, the Slice Engineering Mosquito would be our hotend of choice.

If you use your machine to print standard materials such as PLA, PETG or ABS/ASA it is a great choice as it will work reliably and avoid problems that we can find in other hotends although it would be a bit oversized with respect to that type of materials.

However, Slice Engineering also has a version more focused on that use and materials and of which we leave you a video below:

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