MakiBox Extruder Drive - It's Like 4 Wheel Drive for your 3D Printer
2022-03-07 21:21 by Jonathan Buford (comments: 0)
MakiBox Extruder Drive - It's Like 4 Wheel Drive for your 3D Printer
3D Printer drive systems can be the bane of the machine many times.
My experience has been that for such a key part of the system, there were many significant areas of improvement to be looked at. Most are quite large, have slippage, and they get stuffed up with the material they are driving easily.
The MakiBox drive takes a different approach. It spreads out the loading over much more area, so even softer materials can be driven without slipping. It cleans out any material that may have built up in the drive wheel automatically. It can be made quite compact, if needed.
Based on some analysis of the various size filament options that we are considering, it looks like 1mm may not be the best direction if we want to continue to have room for faster machines using common stock in the future. It looks like 1.75mm may be a good compromise, and it will still work within the constraints of the MakiBox.
The next steps are to integrate all of this together and start doing some proto prints, revise the model design to reflect changes based on this prototype's performance, and get keep things rolling to get the first units shipping either within March or very soon after that still. This was the last significant part that needed to be initially created, so we should be able to nail down the final schedule in around a week.
Thanks everyone for their patience and look forward to some more updates this week!
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Thanks everyone. End of March early April is what we are lining up everything for. Since we are doing rapid manufacturing for this, we at least have very short lead times for the parts that will change between now and then. Yep, the schedule is very lean, but not as bad as some projects I've shipped before, and we will be able to QC each kit carefully. mrmambwe responded: Thanks Bernd! If you DO plan to use a Bowden tube, how do I go about purchasing an extra extruder assembly? Many thanks! dwayne Yes, that is the plan. We will have to sort the second part out, as it would likely not be able to fit in the internal envelope, so would need new parts.
Looking forward to the first test print - will be an epic experience for you and all of us!