Direct drive extruder

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Once I have got my Prusa Mendel 3D printer working, I have started to look around for improvements. The thing I was less happy with was the clunky extruder, made of a geared drive with printed gears. People in the forums mention it has a limited life of maybe one hundred hours before one or more teeth give in.

I thought a direct drive was an obvious choice only if extruder stepper might have enough torque. Then I learned that Orca v0.3 is using a direct drive using a brass insert. I looked for available designs on the Thingiverse for NEMA 17 motors and I have found this one. With some changes I have made it work.

But not before I replaced one StepStick by a Pololu stepper driver on my RAMPS board. The reason is that to achieve the required torque, the motor needs to be driven slightly above the 1A limit of StepSticks. The other required change is to add some cooler to the A4988 chip so it can properly dissipate the additional heat.

I guess 3mm filament is quite more challenging to make it work with a direct driver extruder than 1.75mm one.


Update: I designed a replacement for the extruder above that uses much less plastic that hopefully will perform better too. The replacement was printed using the yellow extruder part you can see being printed in the video above.

Comments

nophead said…
I find ABS gears last many thousands of hours if you keep them lubricated with lithium grease.
6:15 pm
misan said…
That is perhaps the next stop. I do not like to push the electronics to the edge (temperature-wire).

I've seen some ABS gears from an old printer paper-feed roll I might end up recycling too. Or maybe I will switch to 1.75 mm.

Thanks,

misan
6:29 pm
Cadisch Screens said…
Great work, I love seeing it in action.
5:52 pm
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