Was speaking with the guys at MTW recently and we were throwing about ideas to convert an ungeared carriage mounted direct drive extruder into a light weight hifi extruder using the Flex3Drive internals and its 40:1 gearing, with minimal change to the machine or its existing production parts.
Ended up designing these direct drive adaptors. They have the same mounting footprint as a Nema17 and fit in place of the motor which is then moved off carriage. The good thing about the end result is there is no change required to any existing parts aisde from creating a mounting point for the motor bracket on the frame of the machine.
Now working on a couple of variants with slight differences on the casing for different printers that use these types of extruder. Will be publishing source files very shortly once I can get everything polished off, with hardware kits made available aswell.
@Jason_McMullan Thank you, often the simple ideas are the best. Took a little work to squeeze it all together but very pleased with them. These will be going out to customers and testers with some extra parts to cover a minor rework to one of the casing parts. #Boom lol
What are you selling this stuff for lately anyhow? Kinda torn on if I want to get this or a zesty after our talk. – I never had the time to replicate it myself and ended up using the worm gears for another printer. Not really for ‘omg we’re gonna put it all on deltamakers!’; just interested in how well it works.
@ThantiK These adaptors are not intended for Delta machines, although could be used in theory I have better delta solutions. These adaptors are more a simple cost effective option for machines like the CTC and Wanhao, Flashforge etc even a Prusa Mk2 that carry the heavy stepper on a specific or integrated carriage based extruder so that all other original parts including the manufacturers filament hobb is retained. Just swap out the motor onto the frame and fit one of these in its place. Of course one can also fit a full Flex3Drive to these machines. The adaptor is simply easier. See the website http://www.flex3drive.com where we have price reductions ongoing, but as a machine manufacturer contact me directly for trade supply enquiries.
– I never had the time to replicate it myself and ended up using the worm gears for another printer. Not really for ‘omg we’re gonna put it all on deltamakers!’; just interested in how well it works.