I3 - to bowden or not to bowden

[usarmyaircav]

Per some comments in the enclosure thread, I thought I would start a topic on Bowden and it value to our printers.

Granted I haven't even started printing yet, but the bowden tube idea had definitely caught my attention, and seems like a good idea, so as to decrease print times by being able to lay down filament faster, but do you really loose quality?

Are there other plus's and/or minuses about doing this?

[gmay3]

*Partial repost from enclosure thread*

My limited understanding (which may be wrong) is that you can print much faster since all you have to move around is a hot end and a X carriage. I believe that this is most beneficial when you have a printer that has a fixed bed where the the hotend can move in both X and Y directions. It sounds like there is a hysteresis error which I think is a fancy word to describe the lag between when the extruder motor extrudes filament to the time it takes for the filament to reach the hotend nozzle. Other errors added to the system include the diameter gap between filament and the bowden tube, as well as the flexibility of the tube.

Overall, my understanding of bowden is that you can print much faster with a slight quality hit.

[Geoff]

Per some comments in the enclosure thread, I thought I would start a topic on Bowden and it value to our printers.

Granted I haven't even started printing yet, but the bowden tube idea had definitely caught my attention, and seems like a good idea, so as to decrease print times by being able to lay down filament faster, but do you really loose quality?

Are there other plus's and/or minuses about doing this?

I can only comment on my experience, so say a Prusa versus a Kossel .. In where the prusa has a fixed bed, the bowden, tube and the head itself is very light (about 40 grams) so it can move alot faster without shaking the machine.. zero feedback wobble. You would think generally removing the weight from the print head would drastically reduce the energy required to move it, and also increase the speed.. But this does not help your moving Y axis bed.

If the Y axis is going to be moving too like the I3, you then need to find a way to make that faster.. if you reduce the weight from a Prusa extruder, the X axis motor will automatically get zingy, but your Y axis will be the same old Y axis... So then you need to find a way to make that faster..

And it also depends on your extruder motor, for super fast printing I had to get a geared Nema stepper motor, otherwise the standard Nema17 would click, just couldn't handle 100ms feed.