Well I needed to replace a hotend on my printer and I decided to go ahead and give the Mosquito hotend by Slice Engineering a try. It is quite a bit more expensive than other hotends but after installing it and using it for about a week I now totally understand the benefits (at least for me that is).
The melt zone is SMALL. I’m talking like 2-3 mm at most. This means you can really cut down the retraction on your slicing.
Having the very small melt zone also means I was able to switch from Direct drive back to a bowden setup. I switched to a bowden setup and just dealt with the ringing in my print because of the weight, also the filament path was not ideal especially since i’ve installed a filament sensor. Switching to a bowden makes for a much cleaner setup IMHO.
Simple install. I was able to use a minimalist hotend mount (I’m using the groovemount adapter) so my x-carriage is MUCH cleaner than it used to be. Also printing the mount (even though I only had to do it once) was very fast.
Probably the biggest feature I love about this hotend is how simple it is to change the nozzle. I just use the wrench and voila, the nozzle is off and back on in under 30 seconds probably. And I don’t have to juggle a hot nozzle or use another pair of pliers or wrench to hold the heat break. I’ve been switching nozzles now a lot more than I ever have in the past based on what I’m printing, not just if I have a lot of things to print that justifies a nozzle change.
Being able to print up to 450C is nice, I got the Slice Engineering cartridge and thermistor and now there’s even support built in to Marlin for their thermistor cartridge.
About the only thing I don’t like is that the nozzles they sell are 6mm instead of 7mm like the majority of the E3D nozzles and clones out there. But I already got an adapter for their torque wrench so I’ve got that covered as well.