E3D Titan Direct Drive bracket for Smartrapcore

Designed, installed, and tested a new bracket for the E3D Titan extruder as a direct drive for the Smartrapcore line of RepRap printers. It mounts to the head in the same place as the hotend, and hold the motor up and out of the way. It allows full travel and clears the X Axis motor and belts during homing and printing.

Located up on Thingiverse

How has it been working?

I notice in the pictures you used a 42mm NEMA17 stepper. I've seen some discussions where people have been going with a lighter 20mm or 24mm NEMA17 stepper to save weight on the moving carriage. I've been toying on doing this on my XL300 now that I'm just building a whole new set of plastic parts for it.

It's working better than I expected to be honest. Despite the bracket looking rather thin, its actually pretty strong and doesn't seem to impead any of the motion or speed and I haven't noticed any ringing in the print or and flex in the motor during travel movements. Initially, after mocking the design in Onshape, I had that after thought about homing X and then Y, but in this position the standard motor clears the X motor and belts without any issues and still close to 10mm clearance around the motor itself. I was looking at a smaller motor, but the one I used is the one I had on the extruder when it was bowden mounted. In the future, I might change it out for something smaller, but it works pretty well as is.

I primarily made this change for Ninjaflex. Trying to print Ninjaflex through a bowden tube was almost impossible and with the bowden tube you can forget about retraction on Ninjaflex. With the titan being direct mounted, printing Ninjaflex has been simplified so much so it's no issue to print without strings.

Cool. I'll lookup your part and may just go ahead and put a titan on from the beginning. I heard back from Serge and he said they went back to Bowden and I really don't want to mess with that. I've been using geared direct drive extruders on my other projects so I'm much more comfortable with them.

There was another design on thingiverse for the Titan to be mounted to the Smartrapcore, but this mount was going to interfere with my part cooler on the back side of the head module.

On my other two CoreXY machines (the ones I built from the parts I printed on the kit and sourced the rest myself), I use the geared bowden extruder. It works pretty well as long as the bowden tube is the exact length it needs to be to get from the drive to the hotend. I really don't like the direct drive due to weight, but the titan is small and compact and the kit doesn't seem to mind or notice the extra weight of the motor.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/31/2016 05:26PM by PDBeal.

i still have to hunt down a few things for the XL300. I have not found anything for mounting the power supply (LED style) yet, nor have I found anything for the power cord and switch specific to the SmartRapCore. I'll have to widen my search. I was able to catch my Batch 2 Duet Wifi before it shipped and add in a Titan extruder and real E3D hotend before it shipped, so I'm ditching the original for that using your adapter.

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WZ9V
How has it been working?

I notice in the pictures you used a 42mm NEMA17 stepper. I've seen some discussions where people have been going with a lighter 20mm or 24mm NEMA17 stepper to save weight on the moving carriage. I've been toying on doing this on my XL300 now that I'm just building a whole new set of plastic parts for it.

I've been happily printing using 1.75mm abs/pla/petg with a titan with 20mm nema 17, no issues so far. Will give it a really good test on my new delta which should print at much higher speeds than my kossel mini (with ramps/arduino). The weight saving is large and the 3:1 gearing allows for fast retractions compared to the fractionally lighter geared nema 14/11 combinations some other extruders are using. I have to run this motor with enough current that it is warm to touch but its still only around 45 deg C. Main reason for buying one really, its light and its good.

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Simon Khoury

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

What 20mm stepper did you use? I have a Titan on the way.

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DjDemonD
I've been happily printing using 1.75mm abs/pla/petg with a titan with 20mm nema 17, no issues so far. Will give it a really good test on my new delta which should print at much higher speeds than my kossel mini (with ramps/arduino). The weight saving is large and the 3:1 gearing allows for fast retractions compared to the fractionally lighter geared nema 14/11 combinations some other extruders are using. I have to run this motor with enough current that it is warm to touch but its still only around 45 deg C. Main reason for buying one really, its light and its good.

So the one I'm using at the moment is this one (140g/13Ncm):
[www.ebay.com]
[www.omc-stepperonline.com]

I bought the same one for my new printer as it seems to work pretty well.
I don't think you can get more torque in this size, I'd avoid the 0.9 deg type for this application also.

You can go up to a 25mm motor at 180g and 18 Ncm torque. So 38% more torque for 28% more mass, definitely would my next choice if the 20mm one can't perform at higher speeds. But accuracy might suffer at higher speeds with more mass.
[www.omc-stepperonline.com]

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Simon Khoury

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

Thanks. Nice having an option someone has tested.

Quote
DjDemonD
So the one I'm using at the moment is this one (140g/13Ncm):
[www.ebay.com]
[www.omc-stepperonline.com]

I bought the same one for my new printer as it seems to work pretty well.
I don't think you can get more torque in this size, I'd avoid the 0.9 deg type for this application also.

You can go up to a 25mm motor at 180g and 18 Ncm torque. So 38% more torque for 28% more mass, definitely would my next choice if the 20mm one can't perform at higher speeds. But accuracy might suffer at higher speeds with more mass.
[www.omc-stepperonline.com]

Just thinking doing some back of envelope maths, if a direct 1.75mm extruder works with a 52Ncm 1.7A nema 17 42mm then a 3:1 geared 20mm motor gives effectively 39 Ncm torque and less pulsing with higher steps/mm. Win,win.
Master stoke by E3D building the gearing into such a small extruder.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/01/2016 05:56PM by DjDemonD.

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Simon Khoury

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

Ordered the 20mm one from the US site.