Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Gripping Stuff - The Extruder Clamp
The extruder clamp was missing from my pile of parts in the "complete" RepRap, so I've remedied that. Took about 12 hours to print in PLA. As you can see, the clamp grabs a 16mm PTFE rod very well even without the clamping screws. There is also a channel in the clamp to take a 4mm self-tapping screw with which I intend to further secure the PTFE.I was short a few diagonal bracing brackets, but those are no problem and shouldn't take more than a couple of days to run off.
I'm now also short an X-axis flag 'cos I put a bench vice down on top of it...
Vik :v)
Labels: clamp, extruder, reprap
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
PLA Darwin part
By raising the extrusion temperature to 165C I've managed to get PLA going through without blowing up the extruder motor - earlier attempts tightened the clamp too much and overloaded the poor little motor (may it rest in peace). PLA strings more than CAPA, but is significantly more rigid. Here is a Darwin bed clamp that I printed off on Zaphod last night:
The holes have since been cleared of stringing with a penknife. I'll try some more complex Darwin parts later, but there are some modifications needed to the code to conserve memory for large or complex builds.
I've also got to fit the modified extruder drive - the one with a flexible shaft. Hopefully this will let the rigid PLA filament feed more freely still.
Vik :v)
The holes have since been cleared of stringing with a penknife. I'll try some more complex Darwin parts later, but there are some modifications needed to the code to conserve memory for large or complex builds.
I've also got to fit the modified extruder drive - the one with a flexible shaft. Hopefully this will let the rigid PLA filament feed more freely still.
Vik :v)
Labels: bed, clamp, pla, zaphod
