I’m upgrading my TAZ 6 in general. I’ve installed an Octopus 1.1 which reduces the noise significantly and placed a magnetic flexible plate. Now I’m looking to do the hermit crab mod since I would like to swap between my original extruder and a H2 V2S Revo. The idea is to be able to use both diameters, but mostly running out the old 2.85 filament I have while picking new 1.75 filament. I would like to know if there is any adapter available to put the hermit crab. I have the CAN V2. I’m also considering doing the linear rail mod but my main problem is my poor design skills.
Your build sounds similar to mine, except I went with linear rail for the X axis when doing the hermit crab (and the H2 V2S revo wasn’t out yet, so standard H2 v2 here).
Part of the reason I went to linear rail was to reduce the amount the toolhead hung out from the gantry, so the intermediate adapter I made replaces the entire plate that mounts to the rails, so swapping back to your old standard 2.85mm single extruder is not a task you want to do often, but if you build a plate to mount the 2.85mm single extruder on a hermit crab plate, then swapping is painless.
If you try and put a hermit crab on the older modular toolhead system used in the Taz 6, you end up with: H2 Toolhead mounted to the hermit crab adapter, mated to the other side of the hermit crab, mounted to the plastic modular plate adapter that slides into the x carriage (held in place by a single screw and a wedge of plastic), mated to the plastic x carriage, mated to the plastic linear bearings, to the linear rods. There’s a ton of movement in the system, and I can’t remember what the distance from the rods to the nozzle ended up being.
With the modified x carriage, you take the second “quick change” adapters out of that chain, eliminated the weakest plastic-to-plastic connection.
To keep my 2.85mm extruder going, I kept the hexagon hot end, but picked up an orbiter dual-geared extruder to replace the massive, heavy wade extruder that feeds filament in the Single Extruder.
I’ve been following some of your answers which led me to do the current upgrades
My idea is to use hermit crab as a final solution to swap between extruders and adapt the standard 2.85mm single extruder to it. I don’t mind to modify the extruder and place the orbiter one, but I don’t know how I could connect it to the hermit crab plate. Do you have any model related to the X rails apart from the plate? Specially the part connected to the Z axis. I think this part and the standard single extruder-hermit crab adapter are my current obstacles.
I think I’m going to do a test print to see if the hermit crab plate works with V2.
The hexagon hotend is capable enough, that I wouldn’t buy something new to replace it, but if you already have a better 2.85mm hotend, I’d use that instead, if only because the nozzle changes on the hexagon can be annoying, and the thermistor style isn’t as easy to change as others.
I just have the rail connected to a single aluminum extrusion. The X gantry supports on the side can support a second extrusion, but during assembly I did some measurements and found it unnecessary to put the second piece of extrusion in, so decided to keep the weight down.
