Ender 3 v2 Neo Spider Hotend Adapter Brackets

If you are searching for this it's probably because you also purchased a spider v2 hotend only to discover that, much like a lot with the neo, it wasn't actually compatible out of the box. The spider hotend is 5.5mm higher up on the bracket when mounted than the stock hot end and the only way to mount it seemed to be moving everything up to match the hotend, including both fans and the CR touch. I've not tried a v1 spider hotend on my v2 neo, but I think it is also 5.5mm higher so this bracket most likely will work for both versions of hotend.

Because I really wanted to try out the spider I threw together a cr touch bracket and a bracket made to hold both of the fans. The positioning of the CR Touch in relation to the nozzle with the new bracket is as identical as I could manage and I only needed to adjust my z-offset .25 mm. 👍 Although the CR touch bracket is actually well designed I think, the fan bracket is kind of just the first iteration of a proper fan shroud I will be making. So far I am using it and it's working perfectly, but I can imagine that it could create some strange harmonics that might induce ringing in the print at higher speeds.

In the future I'll be making and placing a full shroud stl up, but feel free to give this a go until then. The spider hotend is soooooo much nicer than the original. It's managed to keep up with all the demanding jobs I've thrown at it. (230c, 200mm/s and .8mm nozzle, at 850mm acceleration and 35 jerk.) Really crazy just how much better it is. It's definitely no longer the bottleneck in my fast printing. Here is a quick video of the brackets in action. 👍

==Printing==

I printed the parts with Overture Matte Black PLA with a .8mm nozzle at 230C , a layer height of .3mm, and with a speed of 50mm/s, with cooling set to about 40%. This was done on the stock printing hardware on the v2 neo. Really though, the only thing in particular I would suggest is to print these parts a bit higher temperature as layer bonding is really important. If you have poor layer adhesion the screw holes will likely as the bracket is meant to have the machine screws threaded into it to hold the fans. These were designed just tight enough to grip the screw threads decently but not too tight. (Again, to reduce the risk of splitting.)

Print the CR touch bracket with the large flat area on the print bed. This won't need any supports. 

I printed the fan bracket laying down, though it may be better printed standing up using supports so that the screw holes are less prone to splitting. 

==Mounting and Installation==

The CR Touch sensor is pretty straight forward and just is a straight replacement for the original bracket. It's just 3d printed and set's the sensor 5.5mm higher than the original.. so use the original hardware and just mount the sucker.

The fan bracket is different and is designed to mount both the part cooling fan and the hot end cooling fan. It's essentially a 3d printed version of the bracket that originally held the parts cooling fan, only with screw holes on the end meant for the hot end cooling fan as well.

The fans were held onto the bracket using their original screws. The bracket itself uses the two machine screws from the original part cooling fan to mount. 

== Neo v2 High Temperature Firmware Issues==

On a slightly unrelated note, at the time of this writing (1/28/2023) I don't seem to see any firmware compiled for the neo v2 that would allow you to take advantage of higher temperature printing for things like Polycarbonate. I do see that someone has make a modified version of Marlin based on another pro model of ender 3 that is compatible with the v2 neo and that shows some real potential. That said, I think I'll have to recompile marlin with the max temperature upped from 250c in order to take advantage of the all metal spider. :/ If you'd like to see a video on this firmware, take a look at the youtube video by “Zeltroix” titled “Ender 3V2 Neo Professional Firmware Tutorial, kinda”.

If I end up recompiling the firmware shown in Zeltroix's video to support the higher temperatures that the spider is capable of, I will be sure to post a link to that GitHub repo here. I'll also update this if it turns out the firmware in this video already allows printing at the higher temperatures.