It’s difficult to state when motivation will strike, or what type it’ll take. but we do understand that when you get that itch, it’s a great concept to scratch it, because you may just end up with something such as this amazing new design for a 3D printer extruder as a result.
Clearly, the world is not screaming out for new extruder designs. In fact, the conventional spring-loaded, toothed drive wheel on a stepper truly does the task of feeding filament into a printer’s hot end just fine, all things considered. but [Jón Schone], aka appropriate printing on YouTube, got the concept for his belt-drive extruder from seeing exactly how filament producers deal with their products. His design is a scaled-down version of that, and utilizes a pair of extremely little timing belts that run on closely spaced gears. The gears synchronize the motion of the two belts, with the filament riding in the extremely narrow area between the belts. It’s a easy design, with the elasticity of the belt material getting rid of the requirement for spring pre-loading of the drive gears.
Simple in design, but not the simplest execution. The video below tells [Jón]’s tale of printing woe, from utilizing a viscous specialty SLA resin that was truly meant for a temperature-controlled printer, to build storage tank damage. The completed extruder was also a bit as well big to install directly on the test printer, to ensure that took some finagling too. but at the end of the day, the concept works, and it looks quite amazing doing it.
As for prospective advantages of the new design, we expect that stays to be seen. It does seem like it would get rid of drive gear eccentricity, which we’ve seen cause print high quality problems before.
[BaldPower] tipped us off to this one. Thanks!
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