That has to be the simplest, most printable 3D printer design out there.

3D Printing
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1

That has to be the simplest, most printable 3D printer design out there. Very minimal extra hardware required. Just nuts, bolts, bearings, 1/2-10 lead screw and couplers direct to the motor shaft. Fast movements currently up to 300mm/s. Requires some tweeks to the firmware to compensate XYZ to rotational movement, but that seems to be working already. Let’s hope he releases the files soon.

http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?178,206458,263701#msg-263701
http://www.youtube.com/attribution_link?a=5Vb7wiz1mo0N1BJ4SvQR6Q&u=/watch?v%3DZdIECk7XLHw%26feature%3Dshare

2

Worm drives look really interesting, wonder if it’s an off the shelf part or milled. Also wonder if it’s printable if you scaled up the gears a bit

3

It turns out its just lead screw coupled to the motor shaft. Easy.

4

I love that stepper/pulley setup! That is sweet (and slip-free!)

5

Interesting, so its a tiny bit of lead screw and a shaft coupler, nice!

6

I love the idea of using worm drives in that way. Anyone know how many tooths does the gear have (what is the ratio)?

7

Is this all PLA? That’s a huge heat sink in the middle

8

I’m not sure what material it was printed in. The extruder head is also interesting…

9

Really cool machine, love the worm wheel setup with printed “thread” on the wheels.

Not so sure about that hotend setup, but that can easily be fixed. The innovation here is in the motion/actuation systems.

Is this open source?

10

What’s the total cost for this?

11

zac, the files aren’t even released yet, so there is no way to know the actual total price, but I would imagine it would have to be one of the cheapest possible printers. The lead screw, couplers, nuts, bolts and bearings are probably $20. The 3D printed parts are free if someone likes you up to maybe $100 if you have to go to a company. The motors and electronics are the bulk of the cost. What can you get 4 NEMA 17 motors, and a RAMPS for these days?

12

Don’t forget the controller board when calculating costs.

13

I think 300 is as low as any printer can get.

14

I’ll try to answer some questions.
It is a 90:1 gear ratio which was arbitrarily chosen. The entire project is parametric including the worm gear
Printed in PLA
The heat sink is threaded and is being used as a nut to hold the effector together, it looks strange at the moment I’ll agree but I wanted to focus on getting the movement working.

15

Cool :slight_smile:

16

Simple, but I would expect the wear-n-tear on the worm wheels will be high. Cheap to replace though if printed.

17

Very interesting)) Can I ask a questions? Is there any slippage when your stepper motors works? What step and resolution of printer?

18

Nice and simple. But how do you keep the extruder exactly vertical. If its vertical only by pulling from the axes, then my guess is, that there is quite some calibration to do.

19

Apparently that threaded rod was machined to make it fit the motor shaft, rather than being attached with a coupler. That makes it a bit more difficult to home build… Perhaps there is some other way to make that happen?

20

Henrik, as I understand it, it’s basically a 3 legged version of a pantograph. The hot end stays vertical. There is some software work to translate the X Y Z coordinates of standard G-CODE into the rotational position for the motors and gears, but that code appears to be done and ready to hack into the controller.