It’s nice to see that they were putting in the time and effort required to make the best decisions, but I would suggest testing and studies be done with more worst case scenarios than best case. PLA is supposed to be the very easiest to print with, where does that leave users that want or need to use materials other than PLA which is most likely clear at the easiest end of the spectrum. Meaning a one on a scale of 1 to 10, perhaps they should be working either at the other end of the spectrum, or at least in the middle. This is commentary about the entire 3D Printer industry, not specifically Snapmaker.
From what I can tell the extruder works perfectly fine - you can tune it slightly by using Bondtech gears which are a little better than the original ones from Snapmaker (or were at least when I compared them last year). (Edit: they are a 1:1 replacement since Snapmaker uses chinese Bondtech clones)
The only problem is the hotend itself which in its standard configuration has a too short melting zone caused by the combination of a rather short V6 heat block which then additionally was covered up by a large degree by the lower end of the titanium heatbreak (titanium is a really bad heat conductor). There is a reason why an original V6 nozzle has a longer thread than the nozzles of the original J1 hotend have. The new hotend has improved in that respect since the heater block has become longer and the heatbreak is different.
The unremovable nozzle has little (if anything) to do with the improved function of the new hotend as far as I can tell, so your rant is valid nevertheless. My reworked old hotends work like a charm.
When it comes to speed, it depends however on what you print. There are tests by now that show that high speed printing will significantly reduce the mechanical stability of the part you have printed, therefore that is not really the way to go with today’s materials unless you want parts that do not need to be mechanically stable.
For what it’s worth at this point, I 100% agree with this. I also modified hotends to have all metal (and did go with CHT nozzles while at it). They completely stopped the intermittent clogs while printing.
I tested also the new hotends from Snapmaker, which were provided free given my troubles. They perform equally well.
I run the Snapmaker ones now, but the decision to make the nozzles unthreaded is a little baffling. Not to mention standard socks don’t fit on the custom heat block.
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