Hero Me Gen5 vs. Gen6 (Patreon)

Here is a link to a post with a great overview video covering the some of the major differences between Gen5 and Gen6: https://www.patreon.com/posts/66616382

One of the differences between Gen 5 and Gen6 is how the M3 screws are held in the parts. Gen5 uses captive M3 nuts, whereas Gen6 uses M3 threaded heat press inserts. 

The Gen5's captive M3 nuts has been a huge headache for a large enough minority of users that a change was necessary. I designed the parts to snugly hold the M3 nuts in place. I have used the proper spacing for FDM printing to hold M3 nuts, and for all my setups and most users they do. But, with everyones printers being different and especially extrusion settings being different, many users have had problems setting the M3 nuts into the parts. 

For some the M3 nuts will just fall out,  for other users the slots are too tight.  The use of captive nuts makes assembly much more fiddly and I have received a lot of feedback on this topic.

This is why, as part of the Gen6 design improvements, I have replaced the captive nuts with threaded heat pressed inserts. With the inserts, the Hero Me system is easier to setup and assemble. It is a structurally stronger system and it makes it easier to disassemble for inspection or maintenance. So far, I have had very positive feedback for the switch to threaded inserts. 

Another big difference in Gen6 is the new builtin support for many direct drive extruders that the Gen5 does not have. Gen6 will also have fewer total parts to choose from, yet support all the same (and more) 3D printers. There are a number of other improvements to Gen6 as well, which I will document when all the work is done. 

Please understand that I do not plan to bring the new direct drive support and other improvements back to the Gen5 parts. It is just too much work, and there are more new printer models yet to be supported.

The Gen6 parts do require that you have a soldering iron and are comfortable using it. For those of you who either don't have a soldering iron, or don't want to use threaded inserts, or you just want the STLs to print replacement parts for your existing Gen5 setup, I will be making an archive of all the Gen5 parts and posting that to Thingiverse this weekend. 

For those who want to get any or all of the Hero Me Gen5 parts (with captive M3 nuts), I have created a Thingiverse project archive for HMG5. You can find that here:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5210744

Let me know if you have any questions.

The PDF of the Hero Me Gen5 parts cross reference and assembly instructions are attached to this post below. NOTE that this version of the PDF is for Generation 5 ONLY.

Andy