Printing elastic filament
I just want to share what i tried so far and get your input on what worked for you and what not.
I think everyone who ever tried printing elastic material came to the point where you realize that the most important part is the guidance of the filament after the bolt. There are a couple of solutions for this and i tried a few of them.
At first i tried to modify a wade extruder, but the idler / bolt diameter mismatch made it difficult. Inserting a PTFE tube in the lower part of the wade made things better, but was still not really reliable enough for me.
From 10 points i would give it a 4
Then i tried my hand at creating a bowden extruder for elastic filament and to my surprise it worked rather well. The final design i ended up with was my Compacto extruder. The PTFE bowden tube went through the complete extruder and had a hole on each side for the bolt and the idler.
After that i came over a friends design, the TinyFlex
While i liked it a lot and it simply works, i did not like the mounting though. So again 8/10.
Thomas and i created a NEMA 14 variation
Of course it will only do 1.75mm filament, but it will easily cope with high print speeds (>100mm/s).
From that i derived the TinyFlex V, which offers a V Mount and can be mounted left or right sided (for dual or dual X carriage use).
Nice. How much weight do you save with the nema14 version?
Also, what printer is that?
I’m looking to rebuild my Prusa i3 and it fits most of my criteria.
Depending on the NEMA 17 you compare it to 120+ gram You need one of the more powerfull NEMA 14, they make up half of the over all weight of the printhead.
Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough, but I ended up finding that the torque per gram of motor weight favored a short NEMA 17.
I’ve done flexible reliably. It really just takes sleeving the filament path with PTFE tubing such that there is no opportunity to escape the path, and that there is nowhere to catch and snag the material. The top of the sleeve followed the curve of the pulleys above it. It doesn’t hurt to go slow either.
Nice one, Björn. I’m still looking for a reliable direct extruder that works well with flexible filaments. I totally fell in love with the connected gears that drive the filaments on both sides like @Brook_Drumm sold previously and also @Martin_Bondeus from Bondtech. I just ordered one for my new printers bowden setup but i think i’ll go for a cheaper solution to build one for my Ordbot. I had the Bulldog XL there previously. Unfortunately they gave me one that doesn’t work quite well which makes it hard to get it working.
Maybe i’ll find a solution to get the gears from Printrbot into a working case on my Ordbot, otherwise i might go with your setup and give it a try. Unfortunately the gears seem to be sold out currently - at least at Reprapteile.de - do you know of any other source?
@Helmi I already designed a x sled for the ordbot that takes the printhead in the picture. I have versions for Merlin and j-head mount. If you are interested i can send you the files for both. The sled reuses all parts of the original one.
oh well of course you’re doing it in c4d - i forgot Looks like Fusion360 is able to import them anyway - let’s see if i can work with them. Thanks anyway.
err it just uploaded them but didn’t convert them. Do you have any chance of exporting the files in any other, more generic 3d file format? DXF, IGES, SAT or whatever?
I don’t know of FBX but i guess whatever polygonal format i import i only get it imported as a mesh which (currently) makes in uneditable in Fusion360. But i could then still import it and use it as a template to do my own drawings. thanks for helping, Björn.
Looks like Fusion360 is able to import them anyway - let’s see if i can work with them. Thanks anyway.