My own extruder! Using already made gears.

I got tired of the direct drive extruder. It was unreliable, prone to jaming/flexing and the motor was way under stress. So I designed my own extruder. Its gears are borrowed from an old laser printer. It gives me a 1.77:1 gear ratio and slightly creaks due to a small missalignemt. However it does work perfectly, and I am quite happy with it. I will be designing and building two more of these extruders in the future but belt driven. I may play with a dual heads at that point.

Here are some pics of it. Its not dirty but I am using synthetic axle grease on it just in case. I observed no wear in gears or extruder over 30hours on it so far.



How I adapted the gears to the motor.



Here is a video of it printing a shoe.

[youtu.be]

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Modicum V1 sold on e-bay user jaguarking11

Unless you are using a thrust bearing in there somewhere, your angle cut gears are generating sideload, this could be the source of your creaking. Misalignment makes the problem (much) worse.

This is either creating drag on your filament, which under load will cause it to strip filament a little easier (or break or tangle it), or it's side loading a bearing. Get a good head jam or just experience high back pressure and it can actually generate enough load to destroy the bearing and extruder body (been there, done that).

Also, not that you plan on using it long term, but most axle greases are not plastic safe, synthetic or not.

This was proof of concept. The creaking is from slight misalignment. I see your point about side loading, its not producing any noise bacause of that just yet. The bearings will probably grenade at some point, I have about 50 hours of print time with this so far. The proof of concept to me was the gear ratio's, its not my ideal range but its all I had. I am working on building a different style extruder that will eliminate the side loading and give me the ability to use parts that I can easily purchase. All the parts in this thing are scavenged from something or other, including the bearings. Those bearings were running at 6400rpm for years, so their life span is limited with the loads I have on it.

With all that being said its performing on an order of magnitude better than my direct drive unit, with no drawbacks so far. The main areas I was watching for when designing this thing were areas of flex in the extruder drive system itself. Beefing up the thickness and adding modularity has cured those issues. The ratios are not ideal, for the nozle type I have It looks like the sweet spot is around 2:5:1 ratio and this is a .4mm jhead. I have no interest in going with any smaller nozzle size, in fact I may try the .5mm and if I can find it a .6mm nozzle. The printer has a large build area, and I could benefit with lower resolution higher speed print. I am planning on printing large parts with this thing soon, as soon as I get my damn thermostat in the mail that is.

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Modicum V1 sold on e-bay user jaguarking11