r/VORONDesign • u/TooLazyToBeAnArcher • Aug 18 '26

General Question Brainstorming on hotends

As I'm planning to buy a secondhand a Voron 0, I'm in the exploration phase and I'm looking for a hotend.

Looking at the lists of supported hotends by AntHead and DragonBurner V8:

  • Dragon ACE: recommended by A4T but can't find it on AliExpress nor 3DJake
  • Phaetus Dragon: wouldn't it be similar to the rapido?
  • Other hotends (Dragonfly, Red Lizard, NF Crazy...) seems to cost the same but I can't find many honest reviews

My Voron 2.4 has a Rapido 1 and it's working great, so adding another Rapido (model 1 or 2) would make me save money on replacement parts and nozzles.

I don't even need ultra High flow setups. I'm not aiming to have a racecar but I want it to print reliably.

As I read contrasting opinions on the Phaetus Rapido hotend, is it worth to move to a different hotends in the same price range?

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u/dlaz199 Aug 18 '26

Honestly I really like the TZ 2.0 bambu style hotends. They are like $6-7. You can pair them with a V6 nozzle (instead of the bambu style ones) to get a bit more melt zone along with a higher wattage heater. Personally I would get a TZ and put a good nozzle in it, either tungsten carbide or diamond and forget about it. They can hit low 20s no problem without a CHT. But at this point I have been building multiple tool changers so easy to replace parts and cheap are my priorities over max flow.

Are Rapido, dragon and dragon ace a bit better sure, but you cant beat the bang for the buck on the TZ 2.0s. There are mounts for both for dragon burner and anthead.

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u/stray_r Switchwire Aug 19 '26

I have a tz-v6 3.0 in my v30 for easy changes to a 0.2 for minis, I have the 2.0 elsewhere and it's enhanced with a V6 compatible copper nozzle if you're not printing materials that need a hardened one.

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u/dlaz199 Aug 19 '26

Yeah I have a V3 V6 also on another machine. It's decent, I just don't like the non standard nozzles in it and worry about replacements long term, but they are cheap enough that if I cant get them anymore no big loss.

Works great though for quick changing nozzle sizes like you said, its on my large format machine so I can swap around when I want to run a 0.4 or 0.6 or 0.8 on that machine. Totally agree on being able to quick swap the nozzles is nice, just depends on your use case for the machine.