New light extruder concept out of bolt

I attempted a print and discovered that my budget budaschnozzle copy was clogged. The threads on the aluminum extender tube got mangled when I took it apart to clean it out. I'm dead again until I get a replacement. Stay tuned!

The nuts did chew into the filament when it was trying to push against the clog, but when I reversed it the filament backed out OK. The knob of melted filament that was in the hot end refused to go back through the nuts. I had to clip the filament between the nuts (sounds bad, doesn't it?) and run the bottom piece forward (with the hot-end removed) to get it out and the top piece in reverse.

I repaired the Budaschnozzle and mounted the whole assembly on my printer. First test looks promising!

I didn't see the motor reversing at all during this print even though retraction was turned on when I sliced the stl file. It is running at 100mm/sec.
I'll tweak the motor current, reslice and make sure I have plenty of retraction turned on and try again, next time with a larger object that lets it run faster.



Video: [vimeo.com]

More: [vimeo.com]

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/19/2014 06:55AM by the_digital_dentist.

I dialed the acceleration and jerk settings back and ran the same print again without reslicing, video here:
[vimeo.com]

Retraction is working properly, and the blobbing is gone, but it doesn't seem to be laying down enough plastic. There are gaps between lines in the bottom and top layer infills- this was true in the first test parts, too. I will recheck my steps/mm calibration for the extrusion and set slicer to match the new acceleration settings and try again.

I'm going to start a new thread on this topic and stop posting in this one. Look for "SnakeBite Extruder" as the new thread topic.