Presenting my eBay Ultimaker clone (part 2): the head

An improved hot head that looked like an official V2

You may want to check also the first part.

To the credit of my seller, the printer came with a few special improvements from the real machine. To his discredit though, I am far from sure that he released these modifications under an open hardware licence, as required by the initial designers of the Ultimaker.



Beyond a few pre-assembled parts such as the X/Y blocks or twisted stepper cables and the complex hot end, there were two noticeable differences from the stock UM : the filament feeder had a robust and bigger quick connector (and thus, required specific wooden parts that were initially forgotten in the package), and more interestingly, the pre-assembled hot end proved to be better than the original hot end (but not than the new and better rev3) !


Here is the fully assembled hot head, and it really looked like what became a few months ago the much better Ultimaker V2 hot end, which is now a standard on real Ultimakers. It is a bit of mystery to me how I got this design so early, as I would not expect this from a Chinese copycat. Anyhow I really enjoy the design and did not suffer from the usual issue everyone else seemed to have.

The bowden tube that comes into the head conveniently stops at the top plate. It gets secured in a brass quick connector, which itself is screwed into the plywood (though I should put there a real metric nut imho).