Belt drive extruder

Some pics of my new extruder





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/13/2014 12:20AM by wingnut.

Looks great I have been thinking about this myself, mine machine is belt drive bar the standard extruder. I use a 0.9 degree extruder motor for gained torque and less microsteps Totally belt drive I bet it is all really quiet and smooth now? I have a few questions and comments.

With your shorter bowden how much retraction do you need now? Has the ooze/seam lines reduced much? Is that a flip top lid for quick access to the hobbed bolt?

A couple of things I had on my list were.

Larger diameter hobbed bolt or bush so it bites less and needs less maintainance.

When retracting, drop the micro stepping one notch so the retracts happen at double speed. I thik this would take one wire and a couple of lines of code. Opinions?

Great job!

Thanks. I'm still retuning my flow rate and all I've printed is a couple of calibration cubes so I can't say if there's any improvement in the print quality. To be honest though, I wasn't expecting any. The reason I wanted to go with belt drive was to make the machine quieter. On that score, it's definitely a huge improvement.

Yes, the flip top lid provides access to the bolt and carries the bearing that pushes against the filament. Much like the stock extruder.

Looks good. What is the ratio?

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I kind of backed into a 3.5 ratio. I originally intended to keep the stock ratio but ended up not having enough adjustment room to take up the slack in the belt so I just printed the large pulley bigger. I believe that I still have enough adjustment room left to print a larger small pulley if I need to.

One thing I don't understand though. Instead of adjusting the E steps in the firmware, I attempted to compensate for the reduction ratio by increasing the extrusion multiplier in Kisslicer. My original number was over-extruding so I started stepping it down and testing. By the time I got the extrusion rate in the ball park, the multiplier ended up lower than the original. What am I missing here?

Quote
wingnut
One thing I don't understand though. Instead of adjusting the E steps in the firmware, I attempted to compensate for the reduction ratio by increasing the extrusion multiplier in Kisslicer. My original number was over-extruding so I started stepping it down and testing. By the time I got the extrusion rate in the ball park, the multiplier ended up lower than the original. What am I missing here?

Did the hobbed bolt change diameter enough to account for the difference?

Also if you are going to use Kisslicer to make these changes I would use the "gain" in the extruders tab. It is there for making major adjustments due to hardware differences.

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The hobbed bolt is the same diameter. I wouldn't be surprised if this new one has a shallower cut in the hobbed section but I can't imagine that it would be enough to account for this big of a change in the reduction ratio.

The "gain" setting in kisslicer is what I'm using. Was 1.1 with the original extruder. The math came up to 1.43 for the new ratio. Ended up at 0.9 after testing...

The difference in the hobbed bolt section would make a difference and maybe there was something causing the original one to slip and new one does not?

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FFF Settings Calculator	Gcode post processors	Geometric Object Deposition Tool Blog
Tantillus.org	Mini Printable Lathe	How NOT to install a Pololu driver