My own extruder!

So I wanted a geared extruder. I did not want to print gears. Not that my printer is low quality but I prefer comercial gears. Why reinvent the wheel.

I started out by digging out an old bag of parts that has been sitting in my closet for at least 3 years. In it I have a crappy stepper and some very nice fine toothed gears pulled from an old HP printer. I could have used the stepper to power the gears but the ratio was too high for my taste. I tested my steppers and they really are not very high rpm steppers, they do have plenty of torque though. With that being said I did not want a crazy gear ratio. I wanted something close to 2:1 ratio. I pulled some rather large gears from the bag and found they mesh perfectly well.

In my adventure a old 12 gig quantum hdd was sacrificed for its bearings. I always keep old hdd's around as their parts are always useful.

My extruder design had to meet the following criteria.

1 - sturdy
2 - the least amount of lash
3 - has to have a place to use alu plate to thread the pneumatic fitting to.

I believe I achieved my goal. The ratio is ~1.77:1, and the amount of lash is minimal. Attached you will see how I attached the main gear with printed adapters and a sacrificial gt2-20T pulley, and a picture of the extruder mounted.

I also made a video of the printer in action. I have more pictures and details in my blog if anyone is interested.

[www.youtube.com]

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