วีดีโอ

It may have been a stretch bringing Apple into this conversation. They are only known for proprietary technology, and will go as far as going after their own customer base to protect their IP.

Slice engineering will never see any of my money

🤣 they don't care about introducing new and better hotends. They don't want open source

Thank you for this informative video. A weird question maybe, can we add perfume to this mix, and if so which kind of?

What till they figure out how air cooled engines are put together

Can I use this one in standalone mode

the fact that they even got the patent in the first place is a mystery, and just goes to show how much of a joke the american patent office and courts are. there's been hotends with screws as spacers long before slice engineering was even a thing.

THANK YOU I FEEL INSULTED BY SLICE AND WILL NOT BUY ANY OF THEIR PRODUCTS

slice are just a bunch of trolls. They're good for nothing.

Their handling of parents is bad enough but that paired with their released statement has assured I'll never buy one of their products.

Taking stuff from the community? Of course! Giving back? Of course not! Fuck these greedy asses.

Open source is for people with a principle, patents are for people why want to make more money by sniffling competition instead of bolstering cooperation.

Dear Slice, If you want to beat another company, BE BETTER THAN THEM! I own MULTPILE - AND *EXPENSIVE* Slice hotends. I HIGHLY doubt Vez will bankrupt you guys. I would stand down and let this go, if I were you. BTW, can't "prior art" get a patent revoked? Great arguments here, Jonas! BTW, New sub.

Im just now finding out about this. It's a shame too, I was going to use one of their hotends in my upcoming voron build and I was considering strapping one to my ender too. I'm glad I saw this before I pulled the trigger.

Yeah except Prusa isn't actually open source. They hide behind that label while gobbling up and shutting down any real innovation in the 3D printing space. Prusa hasn't been relevant in almost a decade but still has the balls to charge people ~1k for an upgraded freaking Mendel in 2024. The XL is the ONLY interesting thing they've made in a decade and even that is just an evolution on the E3D toolchanger. Plus Josef Prusa is such a fucking narcissist toolbag. I decided to take a look at Prusament the other day and "MADE PERSONALLY BY JOSEF PRUSA" (or something extremely close to that) is plastered on each product page in giant letters. Fucking really dude? You had as much to do with producing Prusament as Elon Musk does with producing his rockets. While I love the open source community and ethos I don't think patents are inherently evil. Slice's patent, however, is invalid in my eyes and should never have been issued. Wow they changed the standoff design from 1 to 4? aMaZiNg! This one act/situation ensures I'll never give Slice a cent of my money; no matter how much I want to try their plastic repellent paint.

Yeah I'm about as libertarian as anyone, and as anyone that isn't currently ODing on copium will tell you, that means very definitively not communist, but "we added spacers to stop hot thing from touching cold thing" isn't patentable 'technology'; it's adding fucking spacers. "How do I stop the hot thing from making the cold thing hot? Oh, I know, I'll just not let them touch" "you can't do that, I invented that technology, I own it" You didn't invent not letting a hot thing touch a cold thing, I mean WTF? 3:45 literally the entirety of linux would like to have a word with that graph

slice engineering customer service sucks as well. I'm done supporting greedy companies.

I refuse to backup patents. If we want to grow our knowledge as a species, we need to innovate and tweak. The lightbulb was not the invention of one man alone, it came frome that man that made glass, electricity, wire. It came from the man who decided to have gas lit homes, it came from everyone before who created the base idea and it was tweaked and improved until today, we are much farther than we could have immagined because multiple people saw a problem, 1 fixed theirs, letting the next fix theirs and so on. Locking this down is greed. If you want to sell a product, make a good product, if someone makes a worse product that looks like yours but has their name on it, looks beter for you, to sell a product then make a good damn product. Dont say "i dont allow you to make a better product than me" and claim that its all to HELP innovation. It is backwards and unfortunately while i have always loved the mosquito hotend. I actually never intend to give slice a dime of my money and ill look elsewhere....

I don't agree with slice response, but to be honest I don't agree with yours either. Patents are not evil, they protect a company from copies so it can recoup its research investment. Yes Prusa succeeded without patents, but they got into market the right time and started from a country with low manufacturing cost. Patents in injection moulding don't expire fast, all patents last 20 years. Bimetal was not patented probably because it wasn't slice engineering's idea. Their patent is unique because they are using hollow spacers with screws in the middle. I am sure people have used those before but the patent office does not look for prior art online (yes, this is wrong ) only in other patents. The Buda-style hotend A and B posted in RepRap forums does not use hollow tubes as standoffs so it wouldn't be prior art anyway. The heating element around the goliath extruder is similar to Dyzedesign Typhoon which is similar to what you will find is some injection moulding machines. The comments about communism are nonsense, even communist countries had a patent system, however Slice is right to try and defend against hot ends with tubular standoffs. The big issue in 3D printing is that the patent office doesn't search online. As a result a few companies have patented other people's ideas posted online.

But remember, if you don't want the government to enforce a monopoly on the ability to make products, you just want communism, apparently.

Such an American thing to sue people who want to innovate. Heck, they would patent turds so everyone has to pay every time we take a dump ... ha ha ha. Fk slice.

The statement is just stupid af. I dont even bother with a company thats so unprofessional.

This is awesome and I can't wait to try it! One question though - I gotta be missing something stupid but can someone ELI5 how 10g:2g is a 70:30 mix? What am I missing here as far as how this calculation works?

After reading the patent, I think if we don't use spacer made of stainless steel, zirconia or any combination of the two, we're not infringing the patent. Titanium will be okey like they do right now.

It’s 3 pins not 4? Or maybe there thing is actually a copy. Patents basically invent creative ways to work around. Just pay first for a patent for your thing as they typically don’t even check if it infringes.. I‘d guess if they could have patented bi metal they would have. Should be as simple as making a round object that holds the sides. Patents are from my side seen a unfair advantage in a free market as its monopolizing the space.

great video! I am working on a different method of decoupling. I will publish everything in some open format, and would be more than hapyp to slam the door for slice and their funny little patent. i love the bimetal principle, but always disliked simply bolting on the hotend. theres another way, but it has to be very sturdy - which is the hard part. but it is possible, in my opinion. slice is not the best thing ever, even if was close - for its time.... today, VZBOT smokes them, by a mile, and they know it. seems like the mosquito was all they really got.

In 2019 Toyota released nearly 24,000 of its patents for royalty-free use, including patents for its modern electric and hybrid vehicle technology. 24000! Do you hear this Slice Engineering?

Thanks for making this video, i was about to buy the Slice Mosquito and saw the Goliath on Aliexpress, I was torn between the 2 and after watching this, I'll be going with @Vez3d and buy the Goliath.

Oh what a generous donation from Slice, you are the stewards of 3d printing! Sanjay would be rolling in is grave.

The best way to fuck your whole company over is to mess with the big and loved creators within the community that makes up most of your customers. This statement cost them way more customers than the Goliath hotned ever will…

I will never purchase from Slice engineering, that’s my contribution to this. But I will definitely by a VZbot with either Phaetus or Goliath Anyway, it’s mostly US law firm that try to enforce this.

Printer

Too bad they seem to be never be in stock anywhere anymore.

Spacers have been used in electronics and technology pretty much forever, their patent is akin to paintenting solder on circuit boards.

ODG unwatchable with that annoying music backtrack.

I just learned that eye drop are an adhesive. This is basically what’s in Refresh Eye Drops

Specimens a, b, and k do not violate the slice engineering. Please read the patent. Specifically the part of what members are held in tension and compression. A prior art search is a huge part of a utility patent. There was no prior art in that described the the exact way in which the spacers and bolts are used in the Mosquito. The MK8 hotend also has the heat break in compression and does not have structural spacers, because of this it does not violate the patent. Again, please read the patent. Specimens a, b, and k do not violate the patent. The spread of misinformation is just insane.

I stumbled upon this video last night. While I already knew about the patent dickery the response from them is absolute clownshoes. I'd still considered buying a genuine Mosquito before this but honestly I might buy/assemble one of the clones out of spite at this point.

PVP k90 works as well?

Slice is actively destroying the custom 3d printer space, the VZ Goliath was never created to compete with the mosquito, the people who are building printers with a mosquito aren't going to look at a hotend with a 3 inch long heater block and rethink their entire toolhead to fit it. Their behavior with this patent stuff is clearly just so they can stave away competition, because they know they would crumple at the sight of it with their ridiculous "innovative ideas".

Let's gooooooo

I've been using PVP + IPA in 1:18 ratio by mass. Applying it from spray bottle. When the bed is hot, parts stick extremely well, when the bed cools off, parts release by themselves most of the time. I've tested it on PLA and PETG for hundreds of prints - works very reliably. The issue I have with it is that after parts release, some PVP ends up on a part, which makes it mandatory to re-apply the coating every second or third print. So, I've started to look for a solution to better bond PVP to glass or make PVP stronger somehow, so that it doesn't end up on a part. Basically, I want a reliable coating that will last for a long time (yes, I know about PEI or PEX).

Slice's claim to uniqueness is demonstrably false. If the picture of the old hot ends, and cr style hot end wasn't enough to show that then hope is lost. Not only does that claim not hold any water it also fails to justify the patent which should have never been granted in the first place as it is overly broad and to be granted a patent in the US your idea must be non-obvious, which given both the idea's history as well as simplicity, I would argue that it fails on this criteria too. Slice's claim that this doesn't stifle innovation is also clearly false. Its a convenient narrative for them, but the reality is that the goliath is a perfect counter example to this. The patent was literally used to stifle innovation that does far more than the mosquito does, and tries new things that the mosquito doesn't. The patent did exactly what it was supposed to do though, it let them shut potential competition out of the market. Once a company gets big enough this is the kind of behavior it engages in, its part of capitalism. Slice, E3D, and Prusa are companies, not your friends, no matter what they tell you. Patents and other forms of IP were made into law to allow innovation to grow, by letting artists and creators have the time it takes to bring a product to market as well as make enough money on it to make the process worth it. A sort of incentive to create. However the time lengths for these things have not been adjusted in a long time and the US patent office in particular has really failed to keep up with modernity as the variety of new markets has increased dramatically in the last 50 years. Additionally the 11 and 25 year patent windows were created in the days when tech moved slower, and it could take years to bring a product to market. Today a company can take a product from ideation to physically being in customer hands in a month, even less with specific product categories. This combines with the crazy rate at which information can be passed along, and the incredible availability of highly specialized information through platforms like TH-cam means that many people who act in the capacity of their hobbies (like the VZ team) can make incredible contributions to budding industries like ours, and are sometimes actually the best source of innovation. By the time the mosquito hot end related patents expire 3d printing will have long since left anything Slice has to offer today in the dust, provided the other methods of tackling this problem are not also quickly patented by companies as scuzzy as Slice. Why do I call them Scuzzy? Because every company in the 3d printing space has both been under the thumb of patents held by giant companies in the past, and also benefitted massively from OpenSource. Stratasys has historically held a ton of patents for 3d printing technologies since the 80s and at no point made a serious investment in creating a consumer market for the technology. Their patents held this entire hobby from even existing for decades. Stratesys even patented things as simple as enclosures for 3d printers which didn't expire until 2021. They had many years to make real money off of this patent in the consumer space but never produced anything for that market, and instead everyone had to build their own from Ikea Lak tables or whatever else they could manage. It gets worse though because all of the innovation in this hobby is built off the backs of the Rep-Rap Project, an Open Source project which couldn't get off the ground until 2009, when one of Stratesys's patents expired which had been issued in 1988. 3d Printing isn't Open Source because we all like the feel goods, it does so much open source because the hobby as it exists today *could not exist* without open source. When companies like Prusa, E3D and Slice claim to value innovation, and then close off their own source materials, they are already very aware of the history of 3d printing, many of them were actively a part of those early days before ever incorporating. They're trying to claw back revenue from overseas manufacturers who simply have a more efficient manufacturing industry, with lower waged workers; they likely see those people as thieves stealing their profits off of the work they themselves spent years on. In doing this though, these companies betray their origins, and betray those who came before and along side them all innovating keeping that open source going for the sake of the hobby's growth. They also betray you though, the consumer. How many things will you never see because no one can make anything using a very simple idea like an enclosure or support columns, or hob gear for extrusion, lest they fear legal repercussions? We'll never really know what could have been because that's the nature of the beast. But you can be certain that the 3d printing world loses something important with every patent gotten; you can be certain that as long as this behavior continues to generate money, and that companies who do it survive, they will keep doing it; you can be certain that eventually there will be no more room for small innovators like the VZ team because to innovate you'll eventually need a legal team, and to pay for patent licenses (if anyone will sell them to you). Slice isn't Evil, neither are Prusa or E3D, nor anyone else who gets a patent (or at least they're not evil because they got them); they're a company, and companies are not part of the community, companies are here to make money, and they'll use your belief that they are part of the community to pull what extra dollars out of your wallet they can. The people in them may be part of the community, but if they make money off of that they have a conflict of interest when it comes to what is best for the community and hobby. When someone has a conflict of interest you should take their words with salt, and carefully examine what they have to gain with their words. At the very least patent acquirers in this market, in this hobby are exploiting a broken system for their benefit, fully aware of the potential damage and of the giants on whose shoulders they stand. So treat them as such. Make your decisions on who to buy from knowing what they know, knowing who they are, and knowing what they're doing. Vote with your wallet for the future of the hobby you want to see, keeping all that in mind.

thanks for a video, now i know which brand i don't want to support! GO VZ!

For those raising points about E3D patenting the Revo hotend, there's a big difference here. Slice is holding patents hostage and preventing people from using the idea of rigid spacers between the hot and cold ends of a hotend, while E3D is only patenting to prevent exact clones of Revo. There's a stark contrast here. The E3D patent only protects the looks of the Revo, and doesn't stop anyone from making a separate hotend that supports swapping out the nozzle and heater when cold. This helps stop cheap low-quality clones from flooding the market while not inhibiting others from creating products that derive from this core idea. That's a much better way to do patents.

I developed a hot end 5 years ago that separated it with a water cooler. You cant patent something someone else already designed.

A Comunist thing would be like: China taking ove the whole world an forcing every family in the world to own a 3d printer with a Slicing Engineering Mosquito in it. And forcing Slicing to supply all those mosquitos for free. This is stupid as a whole concept. Knowledge must be free and for all. That’s humanity not communism

Slice’s creativity and innovation is stagnant had no other choice other than to patent.

So,being a rebel.. where can I get a Goliath. VZ is defiantly a project in the future for me.. as soon as I find a complete kit [L]augh [O]ut [L]oud. Also, as I understand patent law and IP.. its a deterrent from future development but is seldom if ever held up to anything created or developed from the tech pre-existing.. so youre 2014/2015 examples are perfect, open source or not. I mean if they created IP or patent then they could go after ANYTHING using four mounting holes.. so yes, I could do some research and I most likely would if I were attempting to create something. I completely agree.. spend your time and money on something more productive.. playing a sympathy card and stating you donate to veterans is just bad form.. and 600 to the foundation is laughable

Printer