Belt driven vs gear driven Wade's Extruder

So as the title says, is there any benefit of going with a belt driven extruder? I was reading up about extruders and gear ratios when I read that the high res models require many small feed movements I was thinking that a belt system would take any backlash out of the gear and allow for more consistent control over the filament feed.

It is something I have been meaning to try. It does add cost though.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

My first think was.. How to adjust the belt?
My copy of a accessible Wades has some slots on the motor mount but they are not very long.
and any belt will stretch a bit. Belts need to be tight or they will slap .
using a belt would allow the drive gear to be one of them alloy what u call it T2? gear.
Screw the cost if i can get rid of the printed drive gear weeble wooble .
Even with my best print of a herring bone gear, tightening the set screw makes it misaligned some ..
if some one comes up with a workable belt drive i would gladly try it.

Sounds like the hole in the gear is too big. It should print slightly undersized and then reamed to exactly 5mm.

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[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

adding an m5 nut around the motor shaft (main hole drilled out to 5mm, and one side drilled and tapped to M2) might help too. There's at least one such pulley design on Thingiverse.

I'm not concerned about belt tension, I use a very similar idea to drive my Joe's Hybrid CNC. The only thing of concern would be the stiffness of the primary mount for the stepper and the length of the slot for adjustment, in any case it would require a redesign of the wade extruder which would likely make it larger. On the bright side I have a new idea for gears for machines that want to control backlash on the extruder that should fit in the existing space. Basically, an anti-backlash spur gear, which exists already, and is very expensive. I think someone could make one printable but belts just seem simpler if space isn't an issue.

I seem to recall that there has been a design for this, perhaps on thingiverse.

I think this would be a good idea, not only for backlash, but it also means the pitch between hobbed bolt and motor is not controlled by the gear ratio. This restriction limits the design of the extruder main body. You can see this has been a problem in Gregs hinged extruder where the gear ratio has had to be altered and the motor twisted to achieve the open extruder design.

You could use a small idler bearing for tensioning which would eliminate having to remove pulleys to move the motor.