Pay For Your Sovol SV06 With Just One Print?!

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One of our friends on our Discord server showed us this amazing espresso distribution tool on Printables. It ticks all the boxes for an amazing 3D printed object. I am a sucker for anything with interlocking print-in-place gears. Two of the pieces are assembled with giant 3D-printed threads. It even uses magnets.

The best part is that it is by far the very best espresso distribution tool I have ever used. It seems to be a 3D-printed implementation of the $475 Moonraker espresso distribution tool!

Is the title of this blog clickbait?

I can’t decide if it is or not! I think it depends on how you look at it.

The 3D-printed Umikot tool is certainly not worth $475. There are other tools that may not do as good of a job, but they definitely attempt to do the same job. The fixed-needle DUOMO distribution tool is a little over $200.

You can also spend $2 on acupuncture needles in my Tindie store and print jkim_makes fantastic WDT tool. That is what I have been using for the last year, and it does a bang-up job.

Both the Moonraker and DUOMO are premium products with some real heft. The Umikot tool is an inexpensive piece of 3D-printed plastic, and it feels like an inexpensive 3D-printed piece of plastic. The Umikot tool gives me a cleaner bed of grounds in three or four seconds than I would get from twenty or thirty seconds with my old WDT tool, and the fancy tool is way more fun to use.

My print of the Umikot espresso tool may not be worth as much as the Moonraker, but is it worth as much as the $169 that I paid for my refurbished Sovol SV06?

I feel like it is.

I cheated a bit!

I printed the grey parts on my Prusa MK3S while at the same time printing all the black parts on my Sovol SV06. Both printers are using knockoffs of the CHT 0.6 mm nozzle. Using two printers is faster than using just one. I chose to print the mechanical part on the Prusa, because it was going to take 2 hours longer than the rest of the parts combined, and my Prusa is much quieter than my Sovol.

Sovol build plate with all the Umikot pieces

I printed the Umikot tool with 0.22 mm layer height using PLA. The whole things takes about $5 or $6 in plastic. I already had a ton of acupuncture needles on hand, and I had plenty of the correct screws in one of my assortments from Amazon.

Is this really better than a basic WDT tool?!

I used to do a good job with the WDT tool, but I recently upgraded to a Turin DF64P grinder. My old dosing funnel is too big for the new grinder, so I am using the narrow aluminum ring that came with the DF64P.

The Turin dosing ring is too narrow. I can’t see how good of a job I am doing with the manual WDT tool. There was a tendency for me to have a low side quite often, and almost every time that happens, even after attempting to correct the distribution, those shots wound up having at least some minor channeling.

I haven’t had a bad pull yet with the Umikot tool. It seems to give me a nice looking bed after only three or four turns, but it takes less time to just do ten turns than it did to make one trip around the basket with the WDT tool.

I could live without the Umikot tool, but I would rather not!

Conclusion

We are always on the hunt for those killer prints. The sort of prints that make owning a 3D printer worthwhile. This is easily one of those prints! The Umikot tool is such a delightful upgrade to my daily espresso routine, and it isn’t something I could easily acquire without a 3D printer.

You don’t have to find a killer print to justify the cost of your 3D printer. Printing is a fun hobby, but I am always excited when I find something this useful to print. What about you? Do you have a killer print that can justify the entire cost of your 3D printer in a single print job? Or are you just 3D printing for fun? Let me know in the comments, or stop by the Butter, What?! Discord server to chat with me about it!

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