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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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 |
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.
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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