![]() ![]() When you start to make thousands, you find new challenges and things get complicated. We just didn’t want to get people’s hopes up with concrete timelines when internally we’ve been experiencing production hell. We understand that Soon™ might have become frustrating and unamusing, but when we made it ‘a thing’, we really weren’t expecting to be saying it for this long. There have been countless occasions when we couldn’t get good parts or sometimes any parts at all. Sprinkle in ludicrous lead times and you have a recipe for major delays. If one process changes even subtly, work must be done to make sure all the others are still fine. There are a lot of complex processes involved in making a product like ObXidian. We also had major issues with lead times, for ObXidian parts but also for the production machinery we needed to assemble the Nozzles. The best one for the job is only produced in a handful of places worldwide and to ensure we had what we needed, we resorted to buying Europe's entire stock of this particular alloy. Material availability went mad, and this was a real problem for us given we don’t just use common copper alloys. Putting these setbacks aside, like other manufacturers we’ve been suffering the side effects of the pandemic. We went looking for an alternative, but these things take time. Unfortunately, the manufacturer of this filament had a ‘colossal incident’ at their factory meaning they lost access to their site for months and couldn’t continue their supply of filament. We’d established a range of filaments that we were using to benchmark different coating recipes and determine these properties, but there was one that was particularly effective for allowing us to quickly establish if a coating was good or not. What’s more, the manufacturer had run out of the carbon fibre needed to make more, so we were faced with a three-month delay before validation could be fully completed.Īlongside wear performance we also did a lot of work developing our E3DLC™ coating to optimise non-stick performance. We bought every spool we could find directly from the manufacturer, from resellers and even tried reaching out to members of our awesome community to see if they happened to have a spool or two in their stockpiles. At one point in the development process, we found out that we had exhausted all supply options for our primary “workhorse” filament. They are fantastic for this sort of abuse testing as they are particularly aggressive. At E3D we use a wide range of filaments to assess and confirm nozzle performance, but there are a couple that we use more heavily. If you want to properly test a nozzle for wear resistance, naturally, you need to do A LOT of printing with abrasive filaments. So, it’s fair to say that establishing the root cause of this issue took a fair amount of head scratching and left us with no choice but to revalidate all the parts. It’s also undetectable unless parts are run through wear testing. This phenomenon prevented the coating from forming properly on certain areas of the nozzle. Our specific part geometry, paired with our specific method of part fixturing and the specific orientation of these parts in the chamber was generating a resonance in the plasma flow. Somehow, we’d ended up with an incredibly unlikely situation. What we found was a symptom of resonance in the plasma flow within the coating chamber. During what was supposed to be our final validation testing we noticed something very strange… Following TCT in 2021 we manufactured a sizable batch of V6 ObXidians for our pre-production run, which was the first time using this fixturing. However, for production volumes we knew we would need something bespoke. For all early prototype testing, we coated small batches of nozzles using generic part fixturing. The E3DLC™ coating on ObXidian is applied by a technology called plasma-assisted chemical vapour deposition.
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