Ive printed most of the parts i need for my 8mm rod smartrap build. However all i find are bowden extruders for this design. Havent been able to find an extruder made to mount to the X carriage. I have no experience with bowdens and really have no interest in using that in my build. Before i spend a lot of time modelling a new X carriage or an adapter to mount my Wades extruder with does anyone know if there is allready an X carriage out there made to accept a Wades style extruder?

Well after reading the thread just below this one i guess theres no model available. So i guess ill be making one. I hoped this build was going to be an easy no need to mod build.

There is an stl available now for the smartrap 300xl which has a direct extruder. The issue is weight the high speed performance of the corexy will suffer with a heavy 400g extruder on the print head. But thats how smartfriendz are shipping the 300xl so worth a try. The extruder is in onshape [cad.onshape.com]
However we have been discussing using an e3d titan and 20mm motor which weighs in at just 200g, need to make a mount for it.
The alternative and several of us are now using them is flex3drive from www.mutley3d.com only 85g on the print head.

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Simon Khoury

Co-founder of [www.precisionpiezo.co.uk] Accurate, repeatable, versatile Z-Probes
Published:Inventions

The flexdrive is a pertty smart idea. I cant get the cad.onshape website to work on my computers. The openGL isnt working. Ill go ahead and plan on making an adapter for my wades and just see how it goes. If it turns out to be a pig with the extra weight ill look into the bowden or something else.

That's the right approach, a print head mounted direct extruder will work, but you might not be able to turn up the speed as much, for many this is perfectly fine as quality matters more. I am not much of a speed freak myself but I like the fact my delta and corexy can blow the cartesian machines into the bushes in terms of speed when I want to print a test object or a rapid prototype.

There seems to be a lot of activity around lightweight extruders and it seems that you can make a very lightweight extruder but it has to be geared, and the more heavily geared it is the slower retractions will be. This doesn't mean we have to put up with strings and blobs but there are slight pauses during printing when retraction takes place. However some models require little retraction to print.

I will be curious to see the effect on print quality at speed. That being said I haven't really pushed the machine with the flex3drive to see where its maximum is. Something I will do soon.

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Simon Khoury

Co-founder of [www.precisionpiezo.co.uk] Accurate, repeatable, versatile Z-Probes
Published:Inventions