Phaetus Rapido Product Launch
Working with Phaetus has been one of the highlights of my YouTube career. They make some of the most premium prosumer grade 3D printing hardware on the market, and while they are expensive.
The first video I made with Phaetus after I reached out them me was on the Dragonfly HIC, a high-flow variant of their Ender 3 compatible drop-in replacement hotends. The thing really was a marvel of materials and engineering. But it had one large design flaw: The joint between the 1-piece heatbreak/nozzle was too weak, and I broke it within seconds of taking it out of the box. Instead of giving up, I came up with a way to repair the hotend using silver solder (another one of my famous mods), and finished my review of the Dragonfly HIC video a week later.
You might be thinking - wow, it broke, how could you say they are a good company? Well, it’s how they handled the situation that really impressed me. First off, they immediately stopped production on the parts that were faulty and switched over to an all-steel construction that was much stronger. Second, when I published my video and sent them a link, they asked me everything I knew about how I fixed it. They understand there was a design issue they were trying to come up with a permanent fix. Instead of trying to brush it under the rug, they were doing their best to fix and improve their product. That is exactly how a company should handle a situation like that.
Anyways, that leads us to the Phaetus Rapido launch. This really is a revolutionary product, and it was awesome to be able to get a pre-release sample. Its like getting a sneak-peak of some alien technology. It has a ton of inherent advantages over the traditional heater cartridge/thermistor/heater block. I would love to do a full heat and mass transfer analysis of this system vs a traditional setup to prove and quantify the difference, but that is starting to sound a bit too much like engineering homework.
The only weakness of the design is the thermistor is only designed to go up to 280 C, which is only a little bit hotter than a standard thermistor. I would really like to see this thing running with a 350C+ Thermistor or thermocouple, but I’m sure they will address this in a future version.
I also tried out their tungsten nozzle and high temperature carbon fiber nylon filament, and wow, that is also some great stuff.
First off, tungsten is more thermally conductive than steel or brass. Of the common nozzle materials it is only surpassed by copper. On top of that, it is harder than steel. Oh, and the Phaetus tungsten nozzle is actually a tungsten tip that is pressed into a copper nozzle body. So it is barely any less conductive than copper, but more wear resistant than the hardest tool steel nozzle. Crazy!
Ok, and now the Carbon nylon. That stuff was great too. It printed perfectly right out of the box, and it was so strong it actually broke my tensile testing rig. It really lives up to the carbon nylon hype. Some carbon fiber nylons really aren’t much stronger than PLA, but this stuff is on another level, it’s at least twice as strong as anything else I’ve tested. I bought some strong chain so I can actually break those CF Nylon samples, which should be happening in an upcoming video.
Long story short, Phaetus is great, and I always look forward to trying out their new products. I can’t wait for the release of their new Thai Chi hotend!