At work we have an Airwolf HD printer which has been very nice for making many of our prototypes. However it's not completely jam free. It's been finicky with filament size. If it's greater than 3mm then it has problems and will jam . If you print faster than 50mm/sec then you can count on it jamming some time during a large build. Also when running Nija Flex (rubber) filament it was frustrating at times, it would jam quite often because it couldn't get enough traction on the rubbery material to push it through the tube.
Today we changed out the drive end of the Boden style extruder. We replaced it with an all metal Micron drive from Micron's Ebay store. The engineering and quality of this item is exceptional and worth the money when you see that it's all machined and anodized AL. The driver gear appears to be SS. After calibrating it we ran the print speed at 140mm/sec and printed a larger part that would have certainly jammed the previous drive. The print quality has also improved, I think because the layers are fusing together better than before since it has less time to cool between layers. It also handles any of the filament we had that ranged from 2.87 to 3.1mm. We will be testing it with Nija flex next.
The only problem is the RAMBO controller dithers at speeds above the 120mm/sec. I think the extruder could handle much higher speeds without jamming. I'd like to run it above 140mm/sec but slowing it down to 110mm/sec is probably faster than 140mm/sec because it runs smooth and non stop at this speed. Any suggestions on the controller? When I calibrated the steps / mm on the extruder I had to triple the steps per mm. Maybe this is the problem and the controller can't keep up. I'm going to try and reduce the micro stepping to see if this helps. If you have any other suggestion please let me know.
Tim
Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 05/23/2014 11:17PM by Schultz.
