What is The Mosquito Hotend?

In a 3D printing world where the majority of the hotends consist of E3D V6 variants, the Mosquito Hotend is a breath of fresh air.
The Mosquito Hotend was designed by Slice Engineering to be to be an upgrade over the regular hotends. It vastly improves the heat break performance while keeping the body lightweight and compact.

Mosquito Hotend features

• Excellent heat break performance – important when printing PLA.
• Increased structural rigidity – really important when printing at high speeds.
• Compact design – allows installation on most of the available printers in the market and it makes it a great hotend for multi-extrusion machines.
• High tolerances for the filament path – improves the extrusion quality containing the filament and not allowing any bends.
• One handed nozzle change.
• Capable of over 550C temperatures – great for high-temp materials.

Unboxing my order

Interested in testing the Mosquito Hotend, I ordered the following:

1. Mosquito Hotend.
2. Mosquito fan (24V).
3. Heater cartridge (50W).
4. Boron Nitride paste.
5. Vanadium Nozzle (0.4 mm).
6. High-Temperature thermistor.

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I was expecting to receive an extension cable for the thermistor, but luckily i had one at hand, so it was not a big deal.

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The 24V fan seems to be a good quality fan, and considering that it uses ball bearings i am sure it will last for a long time if dust is kept out of it.

I think a high-temp silicone sock would be a great addition in the future, to keep the hotend clean and without any plastic residue.

Build Quality

The Mosquito Hotend is an exceptionally well-made hotend. I am truly impressed on the build quality and attention to detail.
I could not find any fault to the build quality and design of the hotend. Each component is precisely cut and prepared to handle anything you can throw at it.
The attention to detail is so high that the nozzle screws in the hot block just enough for the SE text to be aligned with the front. I don’t really know if this was intended, but for a guy like me with OCD, this makes a lot of sense.

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It’s really impressive to see the dimension of the Heat Break. It’s hard for me to take a picture of this but a comparison is made on their site.

You can clearly see that the secret of the Mosquito performance is the thinness of the Heat Break. This minimizes the heat transfer from the block upwards to the filament path.

The addition of a radiator to the Heat Break should make filament clogs a thing of the past. Filament oozing should be considerably reduced, including the need for retractions.

Installation

Slice Engineering did a really good job in documenting the installation procedure for the Mosquito Hotend. The guide is available in the documentation section of their site.
Before starting the assembly, you need to find an adapter compatible with the mount you will use on your printer. This mount will then be attached to the mounting interface from the top of the Mosquito.

Because the mounting side has 4 holes, the hotend should accommodate various mounting mechanisms and positions.

The nozzle needs to be tightened to 1.5Nm. You can either buy the wrench, or print yourself one.
A_R_B on Thingiverse has a few available and ready to print.

Is it worth the money?

The grand total for my order is just under 260$. Considering that you could buy a decent entry-level printer for this amount of money, the price seems high. But on a second thought, this hotend is primarily designed for high-temperature 3D printing with abrasive materials. Peek is around 300$ / 0.5 kg so we can start to understand why the price is high for the hotend that can print this. And considering the quality of the machining, attention to detail and impeccable finish, the price starts to make more sense.
For the average user that prints regular materials like PLA, PETG and ABS, I think this hotend is a bit of an overkill, but it will surely print like a champ.
The full configuration listed above was bought from freeform4u.de and I highly recommend them.

Slice Engineering – 145$ – Use 3DPRINTBEGINNER code for a small discount (affiliated code)

Final Thoughts on the Mosquito Hotend

As mentioned before, the high price for the Mosquito Hotend could be a hard buy for most of the 3D printing enthusiasts. That’s why I really hope that in the future, Slice Engineering will design a low-cost version of the Mosquito Hotend (now we have The Copperhead).

If you plan to build the ultimate printer and print mostly high temperature and abrasive filament, you really can’t go wrong with the Mosquito Hotend and I can recommend it without any reserve.

Make sure you check this post in a few days, for installation guides on some of my printers and print samples in various filament types.