Friday, March 12, 2010

 

Bowden Paste Extruder

As you may recall, the paste extruder I’ve been developing is based on the makerbot design which utilises air pressure to drive the paste from the nozzle. The reason for choosing this route was mainly that it allowed the extruder itself to be very compact, and thus make our lives easier when we get around to the head changer. However, as has been pointed out by various people, this does not offer the same control as say, a stepper motor driven extruder.

Last week, Adrian had an awesome idea to get the best of both worlds….A Bowden paste extruder. I had a stab at making one yesterday. Basically, I used Araldite to set some PLA filament into the cavity of a bung, and used the standard approach of routing this filament through some PTFE tube to whatever drive mechanism we choose. Here I am testing it by hand, hopefully I’ll get around to driving it with a stepper motor soon, but it looks promising.






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# posted by Rhys Jones @ 12:07 PM 6 comments

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