A while ago I backed the iSeeing iMicro Q on Kickstarter and it arrived a couple of weeks ago. Naturally I was looking for an excuse to test it, so I decided to put the various nozzles from the 3D printers under it. The images from the Olsson rubies turned out to be quite interesting, at least to me, as these were our go-to nozzles for all the printers for well over a year and have seen all sorts of filaments pushed through them, including abrasives like NylonG and PA-CF.
Above we can see one of the nozzles that has been chipped somehow (mostly likely to have been a heat-bed strike during auto-levelling, but it could also have been dropped). The chip would render the nozzle useless as it would cause inconsistent extrusion and uneven layers. There's also a significant amount of burnt filament in the bore even after cleaning.
Another of the nozzles, pictured left, shows a worrying amount of uneven surface at the mouth of the bore and continuing down into the throat. Why has this happened, I'm not sure, but it shouldn't have happened. Sadly I don't have before use and after use pictures to compare the nozzles to as it'd have been interesting to know if this nozzle was always like that. I can't say that the print quality from this one was poor either.
Right we can see probably the cleanest looking of the three Olsson ruby nozzles, but there does look to be some filament fibres left in the bore even after being cleaned through. There's also a very noticable line in the 6 o'clock position which I suspect to be a micro-fracture in the gemstone, but without more powerful imaging it's hard to say for certain.