Early Quickfill Head Partial Strip Down

[Mike @17bt CHORLEY, Lancashire]

Just for the curious, and not recommend at all, I have gone through my back catalogue of defunct heads, to analyse why they failed. In my experience, early Quickfills don’t seem to last as long as the Dual Material, but then I’m just unlucky. 🙂 These are posted to help equally unfortunate souls, @click @chazr33gtr

This head I stripped down had a Material 2 nozzle control error, and when you take the casing off you can see why… it’s the hard oozy white stuff under the brass collar, which has glued the needle assembly in position. I could elaborate more, but I’m not interested in debating the cause with blinkered individuals, but enjoy the pictures.

To do this work you will need some quality socket head screwdrivers in 1.5 & 2mm, and I’d recommend a temperature controlled hot air gun, rework station, and some non destructive means of cleaning, if you are thinking of overhauling or salvaging parts from these. Bear in mind the early or series 1 Quickfill has pretty unique components, as the threaded components are M5x0.8 vs M5x0.5, the die cast alloy casings are different, as is the PCB layout.

On the outside, this just looks like a well used head, and it had about 270 hours recorded when it came “unstuck”.

If you undone the ceramic heater cartridge screw, you can tease the aluminium back, and release the pinch on the ceramic cartridge, it’ll push out using a small screwdriver. It’ll be slapped with heat conductive paste.

Next up, I’d remove the motor mount, and tease the PCB away from the die cast body. Now you can see the ooze, the cooked areas, and the needle valve actuation arms. Be careful, doing this, as that small microswitch attached to the PCB, that sits off the needle valve cams can be easily broken @chazr33gtr 😉

Now the heater block is exposed, it’s time to fire up the heat gun. It’s best to hold the block in a small vice or similar, as it’ll get hot in the next phase. All the heat gun is used for is to soften the hardened plastic, and allow you to undo things or remove stuck needles or collars.

After applying some heat and seeing the plastic soften, I removed the nozzles, which have two flats and a shallow collar to seal against a fibre. I actually found (and it’s against the grain for me) to use a pair of bull nose pliers end on, and using a firm grip on the two flats, twist anticlockwise to remove. They come out surprisingly easy, and then you can see the filament chambers and needles in all their glory. 😮

Apply a little more heat to the brass collar area, and using the “pliers” grab the lower brass collar and just try and twist the needle assembly first, and if it doesn’t turn easily, just apply a little more heat and try again. Once it twists, they will pull straight out. In this picture, you can see the seal failure ooze has set against the collar previously, causing the “nozzle control error”.

There should be enough heat to remove the heat bridges now…again using pliers end on against the shallow flats, and unscrew.

Next up, remove the small screw in the side that seals the cross drilling that links to the two filament chambers, the 0.8mm one is furthest away from the screw, so in my pics, the red ooze, is the 0.3mm nozzle, and the white the 0.8mm. I used a small drill and heat & tweezers to pull out the compacted and solidified plastic.

My drilling was blocked, and it took a lot of heat to remove this slug of plastic, much more than any glass temperatures or material flow limit, which surprised me, but eventually it was cleared.

Flip the block over, and you can extract the O-rings, using brake cleaner and an airline/propellant spray work for me, but at this point, you’ll find it hard to extract them nicely. Mine were cooked more so on the 0.8mm nozzle, but that’s another story.

Obviously before the perpetual optimist hits the thread, you are doing this knowing you are voiding your warranty, and this type of failure is caused by the user, and has no inherent design faults. 🙂

Maybe the pictures will be of use, but they definitely opened up my eyes, so much so, there’s now a “planB” on its way, and it’s looking a lot better after a rework last night. 😛

• This topic was modified 4 days, 18 hours ago by  Mike.

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