How to Modify a XYZ Da Vinci 3D Printer to Work With Replaceable Nozzles

A friend of mine has a XYZ Printing da Vinci 1.1 Plus 3D Printer. Some times also I cam use it for some my personal purposes. As whole, the printer is not bad. It has massive and stable metal construction. It is closed. Its price is not so high and the printing quality is not bad. In comparison with the other printers from the same price class, which are mainly based on arduino controllers, this has an Android board. Despite all advantages, it has also some problems. Its bad is covered by thick plastic plate, which I think is not heating homogeneous. It requires also before each printing to be covered by glue. And the most tedious part - after each printing the glue must be cleaned up......

The XYR Printing Da Vinci printer uses special filament cassettes. They have a filament counter chip, where the current length of the filament is memorized. It is a serial EEPROM chip. The main deal here is: if the counter approaches zero length the printing software starts to show warnings and finally blocks the printing. And this happens even if in the cassette remains a long (sometimes even 50 meters) piece of filament. You have to replace the cassette and to buy a new, with no doubt from XYZ Printing, despite that you can find in times cheaper from another supplier.

The solution of this problem is simple - the chip can be reset and the length value can be changed. You can find in the internet descriptions of such resetter devices. Our is based on arduino. It requires also 3 spring pins, small protoboard and 3 wires. I will not go deep inside - such DIY devices are widely described in the internet.

Even resetting the chip, it is not always convenient to use the original cassette. It is too small to put inside it a standard 1 kg filament reel. The solution of this problem is shown on the picture. Inside the printer is installed an empty cassette with reseted chip, and the filament spool is placed outside the printer on some holder (in our case a PVC tube).If the filament is PLA - there should be not any problem with such installation. If the filament is ABS type - may be better solution could be to use hermetic filament storing box. You can find such projects also in the Instructables site.

It is that, this printer is done in the way that its parts are fully incompatible with the parts form the other 3D printer available on the market. After half of year intensive use the printer nozzle was wore out. We tried to find in the producers site the needed repair part. We thought that we could find a replacement brass hot-end and everything should be OK. For our total disappointment we have found that only hot-ends are not available for sell. Us was offered the whole printing assembling containing hot-end, cooler, fan, some small electronic board and some small parts for the gorgeous price of 99 EUR, what was total blackmail. Having in mind that we print often and sometimes we use metal filament, what means the nozzle wears out for few months - giving each time this money was no go.

So..we decided to modify the printer to be able o work with standard nozzles available on the market for the price of few bucks for a dozen

We ordered MK8 extruder hot end kit including also the heating element and thermoresitor. We decided to use the old heating element. We extracted also the old thermoresistor from the hot end. Both thermoristors (the new one and the old one) had different size. We were afraid that their parameter would differ and decided to use the original one.

If you noticed the old heating element has a pin which is used to sense the bed tilt. We had to add such also to our heating element. I drilled a 2.5 mm hole in the aluminium block. After that using a threat cutter we did a M3 threat in the block. Take my advice - do not use cheap threat cutters - they are done from metal which is not suitable for this purpose. I broke one, which part remained inside the hole and I had to start the whole procedure from scratch. As sensing pin we used a M3 screw with the proper length. I wrapped the screw with scotch tape, put in the drill bit holder and with the use of pile shaped it as shown on the picture. The length of the sensing pin must be parts of millimetre less than the length of the nozzle.Note the conic cut for the head of the screw.

We ordered a 4 cm throat, an aluminium radiator and a brass M6 insert-able nuts which have 8mm external diameter (that is the diameter of the wider fixing part of the original one). I screwed a M6 screw in the bras nut and with hammer I inserted inside the aluminium cooler block of the original hearing assembling. (it is easy to dissemble the block, to take away only the aluminium cooler, to insert the brass nut and to assemble the while block again). We put the aluminium cylindrical radiator between the hot end and the whole assembling. After that I mount thermoresistor fixing it with wrapped with silicon sheet. That was not good idea. It broke and we decided to use the new one, which could be inserted in the small brass tube coming with the purchased kit. After that we have mounted the whole assembling. We have switched the printer on and starting the heating. It was going extremely slow. It was not able to reach the needed temperature of 210 deg C. The reason was the higher than needed cooling produced by the cylindrical radiator. We took out back the assembling, screwed out the radiator and used the 3cm coming with the heating hot end kit.

After loading again the filament we started the printer again. It started to heat faster than the previous implementation and reached the desired temperature. The video shows the work of the modified printer.

UPDATE : IF THE PRINTER IS NOT ABLE TO WARM UP ENOUGH, PLEASE REMOVE THE ALUMINIUM COOLER BLOCK.