Introduction
As delivered from the factory, the Flashforge Dreamer can print plastics like PLA and ABS, but more demanding plastics like Nylon and polycarbonate are out of reach due to temperature limitations of the hotends. This article covers the upgrade to metal hotends and a trial run with the new nozzles using PC plus polycarbonate filament. If you prefer watching video tutorials over reading blog articles, most of the information is also covered in the youtube video below:
The Flashforge Dreamer 3D printer is equipped with equipped with brass mk10 hotends. These standard hotends use a PTFE (teflon) tube which runs all the way down into the nozzle. The PTFE tube acts as a heat brake and prevents the filament from melting before it reaches the hotend. However, when using the hotend at higher temperatures, the teflon tube starts to turn dark and the diameter shrinks, trapping the filament inside. The only option is then to replace the teflon tube and try again at a lower temperature.
In my search to find a compatible metal hotend I came across the company Micro Swiss LLC. This company offers a number of different metal hotends, one of them being a mk10 type, which should be compatible with the Flashforge Dreamer and other machines using a nozzle based on the same design:
- FlashForge Creator Pro, Creator X and Dreamer
- Dremel Idea Builder
- PowerSpec 3D Pro and 3D X
- Wanhao Duplicator 4S, 4X and i3
The hotends are reasonably priced and shipping to countries outside the US is only $4,95. (padded envelope).
On their website there is an excellent tutorial for installing the hotend on a flashforge Creator Pro. Then why this article? Well, to provide an independent (re)view on installing the Micro Swiss hotend and to cover items specific to the FF Dreamer. Also, I will test the hotend with a recently released polycarbonate filament, PC-plus, by Polymaker.
Installation of all metal hotends
In order to remove the old hotends, pre-heat the nozzles to operating temperature of around 220C. Unscrew the nozzles using an adjustable wrench and a 9mm wrench. Be careful not to damage the insulation around the heating blocks. Turn off the pre-heat function when the nozzles are removed.
Remove brass nozzle
Remove the PTFE tubes with a small pair of pliers. Depending on how long the tubes have been in place it might require a bit of force to pull them out.
Remove the top cover on the extruder assembly. Mark the wires for the heating cartridges and thermocouples. Even ink of permanent markers does not adhere very well to the cables of the heating cartridges. I found this out the hard way. So it is probably better to mark these wires with (painters)tape.
Unscrew all wires from the terminals and disconnect the extruder fans and stepper motors. The print board can be taken out by removing 2 screws.
Unscrew the two long screws to remove the bottom of the enclosure.
Remove the extruder fans and stepper motors by unscrewing the horizontally placed screws at the front of the assembly.
Remove the cooling bar by unscrewing the two screws at the bottom of the carriage. Place the cooling bar on a work surface outside the printer to allow for easy access to the nozzles.
Before removing the nozzles I marked them with left and right and also marked the holes of the cooling bar to prevent errors during reassembly. The nozzles can be removed by loosening a set screw at the back of the cooling bar. The set screws might be difficult to loosen due to the frequent heating cycles.
Due to a minor design flaw in the extruder bar it might be hard to remove the thermal tubes. If the set screws were tightened very hard, they will have damaged the surface of the thermal tube. Due to the tight fit with the hole in the cooling bar this can cause the tube to get jammed inside the hole when attempting to remove it. In my case this happened with only one of the thermal tubes. The problem is easily solved by tapping the thermal tube out using a hammer and a punch. When this procedure is performed carefully it should not create additional damage to any of the parts.
Dislodge nozzle assembly
In order to prevent this issue from reoccurring in future assembly operations the manual recommends to use a round file to remove some material at the area where any burrs on the thermal tube might get stuck. This is optional, but only takes around one minute to perform.
Mounting the nozzles is done by hand, as you need to be able to adjust them later on in the process. Per the instructions I bottomed out the nozzle and rotated it back 1/2 turn. The new thermal tube can then be screwed in, again using only finger pressure. If the preparation of the holes in the cooling bar was done correctly, the thermal tubes should slide in without friction, which they did. After the check I applied the thermal compound supplied with the kit and mounted the nozzle assembly back into the cooling bar.
With a dual nozzle printer like the Dreamer it is critical to align the nozzles relative to each other. If the alignment is not performed accurately enough, the lower nozzle can knock objects off the platform that were printed with the other nozzle, or can negatively impact print quality in parts printed in dual extrusion mode.
The instructions advise to use the build plate of the printer to align the nozzles. This is the easiest option, but you need to make sure that the platform was aligned properly before starting the procedure. If the platform is tilted, the error will be transferred as a height difference between the nozzles. The best option is to perform the alignment outside the printer, but this requires 2 equal standoffs of the correct height. Since I did not have these available I followed the procedure and used the bed for alignment. This is done by first pushing the bed against the lower nozzle and then lowering the other nozzle onto the bed.
Reassembly of the extruders is performed in the reverse order. Fixing the wires again in the correct wire terminal is quite fiddlly. A pair of small pliers is indispensable for this job.
The final step is to heat the extruders to operating temperature and tighten the nozzles.
After the installation I ran the bed leveling procedure to verify the distance of the nozzles to the bed. The bed had to be lowered significantly for the new nozzles (my estimate would be around 1mm). The height difference was small enough that the alignment screws could be used for the adjustment. The height difference between both nozzles and the bed was measured using a feeler gauge and showed that the nozzle alignment procedure was actually quite accurate. No further adjustments were necessary.
Print test with PLA
After the installation I performed a test print with PLA to make sure everything was still working before attempting more challenging materials. Loading the filament was performed without any issues. The stepper motors seemed to have no problem pushing the filament through the new all metal nozzle. This would support the claim by Micro Swiss that the heat transfer to the filament is better than the standard hotend. At this moment I am not sure if it is better, but at least it is sufficient to cope with the high flow rates used during the filament load cycle, which are much higher than used in the printing process. Even when loading filament for more than 10 seconds I did not hear the stepper motor skip any steps.
The test part printed without any issues. Although I did not print enough parts to compare the print quality with the old hotend my first impression is that the quality is at least as good.
Print test with PC-plus / Polycarbonate
Now for the real challenge; printing with polycarbonate. This is something that is not possible on a standard Flashforge Dreamer, nor is it on the vast majority of 3D printers for home use.
Polymaker released a polycarbonate filament in 2015, called PC-plus. This filament requires an extrusion temperature between 250 and 270 degrees Celsius. The recommended heated bed temperature is 80 degrees C. It comes supplied with a Buildtak printing surface, since this is apparently the only surface that this material sticks to.
Since my printer already had a (well used) Buildtak sheet attached to the print bed, I decide to use this first in case the build surface got damaged. For the first test print I opted for the well known Benchy part. It has some challenging features, which would show the capability and possible issues of the new setup when printing PC-plus filament.
Print settings used or this part:
- Extrusion temperature 260C
- Bed temperature 90C
- 60 mm/sec
- layer height 200 microns
- Printed on a raft (as recommended by polymaker)
- Sliced with Flashprint
12-01-2017 Update: Depending on the firmware version of your Flashforge Dreamer the maximum set temperature of the nozzles may be limited to 248/250 degr. Celcius. I am not sure when the temperature limit was lowered, but firmware “dreamer_2.4.20160603” does allow 260C. However, the newer “dreamer_2.5.20161222″does not.
22-01-2017 Update: For installing the “dreamer_2.4.20160603” firmware there are two options:
- Temporarily downgrade Flashprint to 3.12. It has the option to install the 2.4.20160603 firmware. After the firmware installation you can upgrade Flashprint back to the most current revision.
- Remove the internal SD card from the Flashforge Dreamer. The bottom of the printer has to be removed for this option, which is quite easy to do. Place the micro SD card in your pc using an adapter and replace the existing dreamer.bin under the subdirectory “sys” with this version: dreamer.bin. Make sure to backup the existing dreamer.bin, so you can return to your previous firmware in case there are any issues.
The print quality for the part was, by my standards, quite acceptable. It did not reach the finish quality of a PLA printed part, but for a first test I was still impressed with the results.
Removing the part from the bed required a significant amount of effort, but I was able to remove it without damage to the part or the Buildtak sheet. The Polymaker quide recommends setting the nozzle height to 0.3mm from the print bed. During this test the nozzle height was set to 0.2mm, which could explain the part sticking too well. Also the guide recommends a distance between the raft and the part of 0.3mm, which in my case was also 0.2mm. This caused the raft to be also very hard to remove. After removing as much as possible by hand, the rest was removed by sanding. When using increasingly fine grit sand paper a nice surface finish can be achieved. This also proved the claim of polymaker that the material was very suitable for post processing by means of sanding.
Since this was my first experience with printing polycarbonate, I will probably have to perform a lot more experiments to uncover the possibilities of printing with this material and to find the optimum settings for the Flashforge dreamer in combination with the Micro Swiss hotend.
If you have any questions about this upgrade let me know in the comments.
And of course; should you attempt to perform a similar upgrade, it is completely at your own risk.
Cheers,
Robin
im sorry to beat a old dead horse here lets just say someone accidently took the tags off or rubbed off the marks on the thermistors and heat senses on the creator pro or dreamer lol is there a easy way to find the right place for them as i myself did the micro swiss upgrade on the pro and not sure if i got both thermistors and senses mixed or just 1 with the other any help would help me a great ton
Hi the thermistors and heater cartridges do not have polarity so they can be connected either way. The only thing is that you should make sure not to connect the heater to the thermistor terminal or vice versa. For my dreamer the heater cartridges are on the terminal block in the center and the thermistors to the left and right side. ( Also don’t mix up left and right thermistor and heater pair!) Hope this helps
Robin
I think i might have mixed the thermistors just turned on the right and the left was heating lol not sure about the temp sense yet
Hope nothing was fried during that mix up, but if something did break I believe the thermistors and heating cartridges should be easy to source. Good luck with your rebuild!
I think i was testing the thermo run away lol it gave me a message saying wiring issue and wouldnt keep heating up…if its fried im not looking forward to it as with the creator pro them wires run all the way under the machine
Sorry to dig up such an old subject, but I bought a Creator Pro last week, and I’ve cooked an easy path to firmware upgrade.
I’ve done it in 2 steps. The first, is to upload an intermediary Marlin version, configured to bypass the Flashforge bootloader, using Arduino IDE at 57600bps.
Then, usign Auto Build Marlin and Visual Studio, you simply upload the latest bugfix version, which has a number of fixes coded for the MightyBoard (the control board inside our printers)
I don’t know if the Creator Pro settings are the same for the Dreamer, but I guess so.
If you want the files, just le me know.
Cheers!
Hi, I think the firmware between the Dreamer and creator pro are different, but thanks for sharing your tips!
Modified firmware for Dreamer. running on my Dreamer NX. The author is not me.
https://github.com/moonglow/flashforge_fan_fix
Hey Robin, just to follow up here (and for anyone else trying to do the same) – it seems like the newer versions of the Dreamer possibly have a different main board configuration. When I tried to downgrade the firmware the machine would just brick and hang at the splash screen. I was able to revert the FW back to a newer 2019 version but it required flashing the machine at just the very right moment once the USB driver gets recognized upon reset. So it looks like perhaps they’ve changed something that won’t allow us to hack the max temperature. That’s really too bad as I love everything else about this machine. Guess I will just have to limit material types to ABS on this little guy then. Thanks for helping anyway!
Hi Phil, thank you for your detailed response. This serves as a good warning for people with newer Dreamers that it might not work at all on their machine. So for people trying this hack, proceed at your own risk especially if you have a newer machine (at this time I am not sure from which mainboard revision it stopped working, but mine has coreboard rev H and driver board rev F, anything up to these revisions should work with the older firmware)
Thanks again for your feedback!
Hi Robin, I need Your help, would You share the flash print 3.12 for me.
actually i want to printing PC material and want to using hardware method and downgrade method with inject the oldest firmware but I dont know what type my mainboard for the dreamer and Im confused want to try because after read the comment have a big risk.
my understanding of want to printing PC must combine both method to get 270 degree, it is correct?
so any suggest for me?
Hi,
As far as I know downgrading is the only option. It worked for me, but I am not sure if it works for all models. This is at your own risk.
Just sent you an email with the 3.12 version.
Good luck!
Robin
Hi Robin
its me again, i want to inform You about my project to get high temp on FFD, finally its work, no need to downgrade, just give resistor to hack the temp. so i can get 280 degree and also mandatory to use all metal hotend from micro swiss
thank a lot for you help and sharing. waiting for new inovation and improvement from You
Hi, nice solution, make sure you don’t get thermal runaway though. For this printer I don’t expect any updates soon. I am just using it now and then for special filaments the way it is with the all metal hotends, still works fine.
Also explore this possibility. Modified firmware.
https://github.com/moonglow/flashforge_fan_fix
Awesome thanks so much Robin! Will let you know if it ends up working. Cheers.
I have done everything you’ve said but I cant get flashprint to set anything higher than 150 degrees. Do you have any suggestions?
Hi Ollie, Flashprint has a temperature limit for each printer, but if you slice the file to a .g file (not .gx) you can manually change the extruder temperature in the .g file in a text editor like wordpad.
Hope this helps, Robin
By the way, I assume you mean 250C
hello, thank you very much for your detailed explanation of the assembly, can you tell me if these are the right ones?
https://www.amazon.es/gp/product/B019H87E04/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
Hi Fidel,
I am not sure if these are the genuine micro Swiss hotends, but they look very similar and appear to be the right type (MK10), so it might be worth a try. Good luck Robin.
hello robin, thank you very much for your answer, I have already bought them, to see how they work. and thank you very much for your ideas and contributions to improve the flashforge dreamer
Is the cylindrical part of the cold end touching the top side of the aluminium heating block? If it is touching, this will bypass the narrow heat brake section, making it ineffective. If you first install the nozzle and then install the heat brake it should not touch. However, if mounted in the wrong order, these parts will make contact.
Well after 4 more disassembly sessions and not much print output I went back to the original set up and have ordered the new Flexion HT Dual extruder upgrade kit that allows for hot end removal without removal of anything but the hot end. Thanks for your input, I just couldn’t bother with the MicroSwiss set up anymore. I guess for those it works for its fine but the disassembly routine is a total pain. Chalk it up to the fun and frustration of 3D printing.
Cheers Dave
Hi,
I fitted the MicroSwiss hot ends to my dreamer inspired by your video. I am Having big problems with ABS though. The ABS seems to be over-heating and setting in the tube and filament extrusion tunnels through the filament strand until eventually clogging the tube requiring a full disassembly to clean it out. Wondering if you have or haven’t had that problem or maybe suggest a remedy.
PETG doesnt have this problem
Hi Dave,
I have stopped printing with ABS because of the smell. The last ABS part I printed was before the installation of the metal hotends, so I am not sure if my printer would have the same issues. PLA and PETG also work fine for me, without clogging. It might help to reduce the retraction length. I have seen reports of reducing the retraction length to 1 mm solving clogging problems. It would make sense that a larger retraction would worsen the issue, so it might be worth a try.
Thanks Robin,
I do like the accuracy of ABS. I will reduce the retraction length its set to 1.3 by default. I also tried with lowering the temp to 220, even clogged.
Did you retain the insulation on the blocks with the MicroSwiss? I was thinking of trying without it.
cheers Dave
I left the insulation tape on the heating blocks for reducing heat loss. Maybe it also works without, but I think it would not solve the issue since the hot end itself will still try to reach 220C, which is also the intention. The high heat conductive properties of the aluminium will still distrubute the heat evenly across the block.I hope reducing the retraction works.
I assume you used the conductive paste supplied with the hot ends to mount them in the cooling bar? This will facilitate a sharp transition between the cold and hot parts.
I have tried both extruders with and without paste but none was supplied I used heat sink paste I had. What type of paste did you get?
I am going to try another brand of ABS as I only had FlashForge ABS. I now have a roll of Zortrax arrived to try. If this doesn’t work I will give up on them its an absolute pain to strip out the MicroSwiss set up compared to the PTFE originals and every print seems to fail about an hour and a half in.
David, I hope the new ABS from a different vendor will give you better results. Unclogging the nozzles frequently is indeed a pain. The set of nozzles I ordered came with thermal paste marked with Intel or AMD, so it is probably standard heat sink paste.
If also the new ABS fails, you could also try asking micro Swiss customer support if they have any suggestions if you haven’t done so already.
Hi Robin,
This is a great writeup. I recently tried loading the .bin file in my FF dreamer SD (a new 2019 model), but it didn’t seem to do anything. Is there anything other than loading it on the SD and powering up the machine that I need to do?
Do you have an old version of flashprint you give give me a link to that I could try?
Thanks
Hey,
Not sure why the .bin file trick did not work on your newer Flashforge Dreamer. Here is a temporary link to Flashprint 3.12 in my dropbox (make sure to save a local copy since I will likely delete this file again in the future). If the link doesn’t work send me your email address through the contact form. I hope you can get it to work!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ehj4hn63ys3cobk/FlashPrint_3.12.0.exe?dl=0
Robin