Some food for thought.

3D Printing
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1

Some food for thought.

If we can find something similarly ancient to this Patent US3016451 in the patent system with a “quick release” mechanism, or manuals for 20+ year old products (or existing devices in museums) that have mechanisms to quickly disengage a filament from the drive system…

Since 20140120196 (http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2014/0120196.html) specifies an “extruder assembly”, something pre-existing for semi-automated, industrial hot-glue or thermoplastic dispensing should do the trick. Kill the overly-broad independent claims 1 and 14 and the patent’s effectively dead.

I don’t read anything uniquely “three-dee-printing” specific to it. Any industry that uses tools that take a “filament” feedstock as input and passes it thru an “extruder” is likely to already have benefited from a quick-release mechanism to ease reloading. The tricky bit is finding those examples and mapping each element in the patent’s claims directly to (sub)system elements.

Disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer. :wink:
https://www.google.com/patents/US3016451

2

Welders use a quick release system too. Not just looking exactly the same. But the function is exactly the same.

3

The gottcha with metal welders is that they aren’t typically “extruders” in the sense that they pass the material thru a melt-zone and out a smaller-diameter/shaped nozzle. (Unless there are some examples that extrude?) Plastic welders, perhaps?

4

My hot melt glue guns are all extruders with screw off nozzles. Might be a patient on those.