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Re: Cycloidal Extruder Drive: A lightweight direct extruder drive unit - 8 years ago
Well to be brutally honest, what I have made so far has been a great intellectual exercise for me as well as helping improve the setup and operations of my CNC mill and lathe. Mixing both additive and subtractive machining in the same solution is also very interesting - and trying to use the strengths of both. The gears are now down to an 8-9 minute exercise (don't ask how many I have made so faby Simon0362 - General
Re: Cycloidal Extruder Drive: A lightweight direct extruder drive unit - 8 years ago
Just a short update - I have spent some time getting the CNC operational enough to machine the gear casing and the gears as well as the pin holder plate - which is now merged with the drive shaft for the extruder itself. The good news is that I can now produce all of these elements with relative ease - but I am still tidying them up - the photos show various areas where further work is needed.Alsby Simon0362 - General
Re: Cycloidal Extruder Drive: A lightweight direct extruder drive unit - 8 years ago
Thanks. Centre part printed pretty well - although this was only a 0.4mm trial for sizing - SlicR using pillar supports left the outside ok, the centre 10mm tube section will I strongly suspect need a cleaning tool applied to arrive at a truly circular hole for the bearings - 'TBA'....! Least successful part is the top mount for the stepper but I think that could be improved with a different proby Simon0362 - General
Re: Cycloidal Extruder Drive: A lightweight direct extruder drive unit - 8 years ago
Heinrich, I will do - but some of it is still 'work in progress' and needs me to confirm it will work first! For the 5mm shaft with the MK8 attached, the bearings are arranged as you drew them I think - one bearing either side of the Mk8 supporting the pin plate at one end. The through shaft will have one bearing on what is now the back plate of the gearbox to support that end of the shaft. Moby Simon0362 - General
Re: Cycloidal Extruder Drive: A lightweight direct extruder drive unit - 8 years ago
I have been quietly proceeding down the route of mounting the motor and the gearbox either side of the filament feed and it has been slow progress (mostly external issues) but I now have something to show for it. After the debacle last time when I discovered that the unit fouled the support arms, I did a little more analysis this time and I now have a unit that sits on top of the spider with theby Simon0362 - General
Re: Cycloidal Extruder Drive: A lightweight direct extruder drive unit - 8 years ago
Quote Simon, what thickness of aluminum did you use for the eccentric gears? Also, did you use the same tooling as the housing? Also do you happen to know the weight difference between the aluminum and printed parts? I have access to a CNC mill and may have to give this a shot since I was having a hard time getting usable prints out of PETG. Erich Hi Erich, I ended up using some 6.5mm becausby Simon0362 - General
Re: Cycloidal Extruder Drive: A lightweight direct extruder drive unit - 8 years ago
Quoteo_lampe This mockup above is still without stepper. I'm afraid it will interfere with the rods, as soon as they "go sideways"... Yup......somehow my original calculations didn't take the extremes into account. 'When' I have some time to spare, I want to draw up the extremes of the available space - I think there are opportunities to reduce the length of the stepper-gearing to help alleviateby Simon0362 - General
Re: Cycloidal Extruder Drive: A lightweight direct extruder drive unit - 8 years ago
QuoteSimon0362 Quote Regarding the packaging - I think somewhere along the line I have failed to allow for some of the worst case scenarios so there is some interference - I need much more time to analyse this which I won't have through until sometime next week so my solution may still end up with more changes....I can see me trying to reduce the overall length from the front of the moter to thby Simon0362 - General
Re: Cycloidal Extruder Drive: A lightweight direct extruder drive unit - 8 years ago
Quote Simon, the machining looks promising! Coming back to the previous post: How does the assembly look like on your spider? I am still not happy with the packaging: Hanging everything below the spider is fine for the center of mass and the motion direction of action, but reduces build-volume. Also it makes the nozzle more sensitive to any "wiggle" in the printer's actuation system. Arrangingby Simon0362 - General
Re: Cycloidal Extruder Drive: A lightweight direct extruder drive unit - 8 years ago
Quotepowdermetal If you go for machined components, pls include the two eccentric gears as well in Aluminium - their profile's precision and holes' pitch angles are crucial for a uniform transmission. Waiting for my Aluminium parts as well - would whish, I had your equipment... Hi Powdermetal, all, managed to get my CNC mill functioning at the weekend and the first run was the eccentric gears -by Simon0362 - General
Re: Cycloidal Extruder Drive: A lightweight direct extruder drive unit - 8 years ago
Hi PM - good idea to move and refocus the discussions. These 3 screenshots show my own adaptation of your mount as described in my 'ping' - BTW, I converted this for 1.7mm instead of 3mm since that is all I use The intention is that this sits above the spider and the E3D sits underneath with long screws clamping the two parts with the spider in the middle. The setting on my Kossel allow enougby Simon0362 - General
Re: This engineer claims 100 grams direct extruder. I want one
- 8 years ago
Ping.........! Anybody advanced any further with this project? I heavily modified the casing drawings to arrive at something suitable for my Kossel where the E3d hangs underneath the spider but a load of other diversions mean that I don't yet have a fully operational unit - but I am interested to hear how others are getting along. Having recently moved house, my workshop is slowly getting backby Simon0362 - General
Re: Printing flexible filament using a direct drive extruder - anyone done this? - 8 years ago
Great, looks really interesting. I will need to adapt it to mount my specific case but I am already working on the STEP files in OnShape. Thanks Simonby Simon0362 - Delta Machines
Printing flexible filament using a direct drive extruder - anyone done this? - 8 years ago
Hi All, I have a need for occasional use of flexible filament using my Kossel XL and was contemplating building a separate extruder to mount on the effector - given the low speed extrusion of this filament, the drawbacks of the additional weight and momentum I assume to be negligible. I am really happy with my existing bowden setup so I don't want a permanent change and would like the ability toby Simon0362 - Delta Machines
Re: How to correctly measure arm length? - 9 years ago
Thanks for the responses regarding measuring the arm lengths. I looked through my box of kit and came up with the following method which may give others some ideas: Equipment was: Internal Micrometer (bore type) Gauge blocks (Johanssen blocks) 2 pieces of 3mm Silver Steel (Drill Rod) I used the silver steel to construct the original arms (glue one end of the rod to a Traxxas joint, allow to dryby Simon0362 - Delta Machines
Re: How to correctly measure arm length? - 9 years ago
Interested to hear how everybody 'accurately' measures the arm length to a 1/10 mm...My arms are ~330mm in length and most of my really accurate equipment is only capable of measuring to 12"/300mm... Part way through a Kossel XL from Builda3DPrinter so this is about to become a critical issue! Simonby Simon0362 - Delta Machines