What you see above is the culmination of [Zach Smith]’s work building a pinch wheel style extruder for the RepRap. The current RepRap 3D printer uses a screw mechanism to push 3mm polymer filament into a heating barrel where it is melted and then extruded through a fine nozzle. [Zach]’s new version uses a drive gear from SDP/SI mounted directly to the DC motor we saw him teardown earlier. He’s redesigned the carrier for the extruder as well. It’s now much lighter and has provisions for mounting current and future controller electronics along with a magnetic rotary encoder. In the last two days, he’s been doing real world testing. It’s been doing well, but he’s learning to do things like always using a full spool and not trying to run short lengths back to back.
I’ve been kicking the idea around of building a reprap that uses reclaimed plastics for extruding material, I like this design very much. It could work well with irregular shape material it seems.
I’m building a reprap at the moment and I think i’ll give this extruder design a shot – looks better than the other system.
The obligatory question is : how much of the extruder can be extruded now ?