MakerBot Plastruder MK4

Hello everyone,

I have nearly completed my mendel with the exception of the extruder mechanism. I have been scouring around, and found the MakerBot webpage with their MK4 extruder. So here is the question;
Is the MK4 extruder compatible with Mendel?
Does anyone have opinions on this? Or better yet, does anyone have practical experience with this?
According to Bre, there might be some interfacing issues....
What might he be refering to, here? He did mention that the MK4 is rather bulky, and might not be ideally suited for the mendel x-frame, from a sheer weight perspective.
I would love to hear some thoughts and/or experiences from this forum, as I really must decide soon which way to proceed, on my mendel construction.

Thankyou in advance
Marius Botha
Pretoria, South Africa
[mariushermanbotha.wordpress.com]

Another thing you may wish to consider is the Makerbot MK4 extruder is driven by a gear motor, where most Mendel extruders are driven by a stepper. In my experience it is easier to get the stepper extruders working with the RepRap Host/Firmware and gear motor extruders with the Makerbot Firmware/ReplicatorG/Skeinforge.

Also, you can make a pinch-wheel extruder out of whatever stiff material you have handy (hardwood for example) and a hand drill or drill press. I used this as a guide:


Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/26/2010 03:32PM by jeffpark_.

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