The 3d printer project continues unabated as does my introduction to these new things as well as the reintroduction to things I haven’t seen (if they even existed) since college. It really is a blast.
The Extruder
The Toranado Precision Extruder is a continuing project to improve on the relatively crappy extruders that are supplied with the 3d printers. The main features are pretty good:
- Modest weight
- More accurate extrusion and retraction
- The hot end can be exchanged and worked on without removing the extruder
- A cooling fan for the extruded material
I’ve been at it for weeks. I’ve been disorganized in making my various orders and, of course, I’ve had to order too much of some things. For example, the ball bearings come in a quantity of 10 and I needed 2.
I’m in the final stages of the extruder.
Inductive Auto Leveling
There’s a spot to mount (depending on what you actually print) a sensor on the extruder to use for auto bed leveling. Leveling is a tedious and very often repeated chore on the printers and small errors can lead to the model not adhering at all or losing a layer or two and other unfortunate defects.
The software most printers use (Marlin) is capable of taking and remembering a grid of auto measured points and compensating the output for them.
There are (I just read this yesterday) no less than four distance sensors for this kind of purpose but what I chose was inductive. It did have one drawback, I had to replace the build bed with one made of aluminum. On the plus side aluminum is unlikely to ever shatter the way borosilicate glass might.
Once setup the sensor consistently registers at 4mm from the bed. I’ll need to construct a small circuit – the sensor is operating on 12v and the rest of the system is on 5v. I decided to dust off my EE knowledge and do a proper job of it and not just use a voltage divider. I’m even putting a little power LED on the small pc board I’m going to built so I know 12v power is connected.
The system treats the sensor as a replacement for the z-axis min stop so that stop can be replaced which is another benefit since it was hard to keep adjusted.
New Carriage
The new extruder probably could have been made to mate somehow to the old carriage but there were already done designs so I printed one. As an added benefit I’m hoping the x-axis stop will now be able to be mounted back where the mount is and work as designed.
The new carriage improves the belt clamp which will eliminate a great deal of fussing and also clamps the linear bearings instead of using wire ties.
Summary
All in all the improvements to date (z axis screw replacement and linear bearing replacements) have been well worthwhile. We’ll see on the next round.
My Gifted Life 