Behold, my poor hacked on Ender-3. I had bought a clone of the Micro Swiss hotend (I believe off Amazon) so I could print PETG and other high temp materials without PFTE tubing damage issues. I’d also had issues back then with getting the PTFE tubing to seal against the nozzle so I figured this setup would be great!

Unfortunately, I bought… the lowest caliber of dumpshit.

In what I thought was just desperately throwing parts at my printing issues, which led to “missing layer” kind of faults everywhere, I bought this titanium heat break from TH3D. It works with all the other stock hotend parts, which I’d saved in a box of bits. Turns out that’s exactly what I needed… So here’s what I replaced.

I’m not actually sure what kind of metal this was made of to be honest or if it was even advertised as titanium, stainless, —???

All I can say though is I suspect it’s way too thermally conductive. I had to print hotter than I expected on this machine and the PID tuning values were WILDLY different after changing the heat break. Previously, with the same filament, this temp tower was just starting to print acceptably at the lowest floor which is 230C; now the lower floor is string city, which makes a lot more sense for PLA. Oh, and no missed layers either.