I’m looking for a new extruder for my i2. not a hotend. There are so many varieties out there, I don’t know which one to print.
Looking for strength and reliability. I have the aluminium locking plate for the j-head, so I want it to be compatible with that.
So far I like the kuhlig design, but I’m still undecided.
this one rocks!:
I’ve always used the one that Nicolas posted, and it’s always been nothing less than stellar.
I had a lot of trouble getting that particular one sliced with Slic3r successfully. There was something non-manifold about it, which (despite my comment on Thingiverse) I’m thinking is in his hex nut traps, then Slic3r would choke and sort of repeat lower layers so that the print was really not salvageable.
I ended up printing the gregs-wade-v3.stl from the i3 repo, which is basically Greg’s Accessible Hinged, but with the motor mount moved up to fit over the i3 X-carriage, and horizontal mounting (in additional to the backward compatible vertical mounting), so you could use it for your i2 and reuse for i3. If you did, you would probably lose 20mm of Z height.
Oh, and by going with my last suggestion, you lose the tilted screws, but not much else I can think of from the JGW
As above, Greg’s wade reloaded if you don’t care about overall weight. If you do care about weight then this is a good option: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:42112 I’ve been using this extruder for 6 months with no issues.
As suggested by Nicolas and as many people, I use Jonas Kuheling’s Greg’s Wade Reloaded because that’s what came with my Lulzbot. Lulzbot uses spring loaded screws on the idler and this works pretty well, but I hate that after pulling down the idler, I have to struggle to compress both strong springs while putting the idler back in place, and I loose the exact position and applied pressure they had on the idler… it’s a PITA. I was thinking of giving this one a try when I had the chance because of its “trigger” mechanism: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:40642
But then someone on the Lulzbot forum pointed me to the TAZ new extruder latch which has a similar purpose. It is used with the Greg’s Wade Reloaded, the springs only need to be shorter. I believe they come from McMaster, you can find their part number in the TAZ BOM. http://downloads.lulzbot.com/lulzbot/TAZ/hardware/printed_parts/extruder_latch/
http://downloads.lulzbot.com/lulzbot/TAZ/photos/budaschnozzle/Lulzbot_product_4-8-131328-1024.html
@Tony_Olivo
You may be interested to know that Lulzbot is remodeling the Greg’s Wade Reloaded in FreeCAD. It can be downloaded from their devel repo but I found a problem with it. Still need to contact them to let them know.
I am, indeed, interested! Thanks, I’ll follow up on that. I’ve bought like $12 in parts from them, that makes me a dev, right? ;]
@Tony_Olivo
Out of curiosity where can this gregs-wade-v3.stl file be found? Or more precisely, what’s that i3 repo url? josefprusa’s github does not include it. Thanks!
Thanks, I’m printing the keuhling extruder now. It failed to attach on 2 of the bridges, and I had to repair it through netfabb cloud.
I might slice it again with support enabled.
What’s interesting is Lulzbot’s FreeCAD file for the kuehling extruder has support modeled in. But as I said the file should not be used for now because the history tree is shot. FreeCAD can be finicky…
And specifically, you’ll head into box_frames/extras to find it.
I think all the hinged Greg’s variants have that little support structure built in for the idler fulcrum.Enabling support in your slicer might mean a lot of trash to clear out of the bearing hole that gets printed at the bottom, which I assume is why there’s that bridge support built into the model. Check the gcode before you print, you really want that first layer of idler bridge to be straight bridges from the body to the support piece. If they’re pointing the wrong way, you might be able to rotate it in the plater or twiddle some settings.
Sorry my phone was doing things in my pocket.
Ok so I had a long comment on my experience with this extruder but my phone messed up the post. So ill sum it up.
My experience with the hinged version of the wades extruder is poor, keep cracking and splitting the idler at the hinge. So I went with the block idler and it works great.
If you are going with wades style extruder I would go with the Hyena bolt 2.0 this thing is awesome in the 6 months i have only had it gum up twice (and that was due to user error). I can even change feedstock while the printer is printing. Here is a link to the bolt. http://shop.arcol.hu/item/hyena
and the loaded spring bolts. http://shop.arcol.hu/item/spring-kit
they work great for the block idler.
Thanks, was looking for stls rather than the .scad that were there. It’s slightly different from jonaskuehling’s.