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.

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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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Comment

Florian Horsch responded:
 
Great work Jonathan. Get yourself some rest - you've deserved it ;) (Had the feeling that you almost fell asleep toward the end of the video)

Looking forward to the first test print - will be an epic experience for you and all of us!

 
rtideas responded:
 
Well done. Thanks for the update.
 
amramsey responded:
 
Looking good. Its an interesting design and pretty compact. Looking forward to getting my hands on it. March is a pretty aggressive schedule!
 
Jonathan Buford responded:
 

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:

 
impressive stuff, can't wait to try it out!
 
Bernd responded:
 
Great concept and great work Jonathan. It is fun to see whats comming up. This will be my best buy ever :-)
 
Jonathan Buford responded:
 

Thanks Bernd!

dwayner responded:
 
Question: do you plan to use a Bowden tube to carry the filament to the hot extruder? I'm hoping the answer is YES, because one of the first enhancements that I'd like to see added to the printer is the ability to have at least two different filaments being able to be used selectively. This would allow, for example, the ability to extrude either PLA or ABS for permanent or temporary structures.

If you DO plan to use a Bowden tube, how do I go about purchasing an extra extruder assembly?

Many thanks!

dwayne

Jonathan Buford responded:
 

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.

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