Fitting an Ultimaker 2 print head on an Ultimaker 1 printer

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una head.jpg

I’ve had Una, my Ultimaker 1 printer since 2012. Over the years she’s delivered lots of 3d prints and quite a bit of frustration. It turns out that 3D printers are a vocation, not a platform. Recently Una has been through a bit of a purple patch, with poor quality and failed prints. I’ve tried a number of things to fix this, my most radical has been to completely replace the print head with one from an Ultimaker 2. I started with some shopping:

  • I bought a replacement print head here.

  • I bought a replacement head block to fit the heater cartridge here.

  • I bought a tiny fan to go in the print head here.

I made sure to buy the print head and head block for 3mm filament. When they arrived I got busy fitting them. There is a slight problem with moving from an Ultimaker 1 to 2, which is that the two rods that support the print head are not oriented the same way. This means that I had to rotate the top part of the new print head by 90 degrees so that the hole for the filament and print block lined up up. This means that I can’t use dual filament any more but didn’t bother me though, as I only ever want to print one filament at a time.

The other problem I had was that there was nothing on the new head to support the thermistor interface which is fitted to the print head of the Ultimaker 1. To fix that I’ve designed a little platform and a couple of washers that fit into the redundant second filament feed hole. You can find the designs on Thingiverse here.

topfitting.png

Yon can see how they are fitted above. I used the connection cable for the second thermistor for a second print head to supply power the little fan. It needs 5volts and should run all the time the printer is switched on. I found some very good assembly instructions here that told me how everything else fitted together.

This upgrade has been a success. Una now prints as well, if not better than before. I’ve not had to change any of the software settings because the fundamental elements of the printer remain the same.. If you have an old Ultimaker 1 that you want to give a new lease of life, I reckon it is well worth doing.