Tuesday 21 June 2011

Wade’s Extruder Build

I have decided to abandon my previous Adrian’s extruder built from cast plastic parts, the oval gears were a nightmare to shape down to circles and the never seemed to mesh quite right. The printed plastic parts bought from nophead came with the parts for a Wade’s extruder (much better quality), so I thought I may as well build one.

For the Wade’s extruder build I needed to make a hobbed M8 bolt. Originally I was going to use the M3 tap set up I had seen before, but I came across this method that uses a Dremmel to cut slots in a threaded bolt to create spikes that will grip the filament. I thought this looked a little easier to do so I thought I would try this method first (plus less likely to break my one and only M3 tap). I found it really easy to cut the slots, though it did eat through a couple of cutting disks to do it. My cuts aren’t as tidy as the ones in the wiki but hopefully should do the job, I’ll let you know what the results are when I get my new stepper motor and I can test it out. I think it would have been better to have used masking tape so I could have marked evenly spaced cuts.

The Wade’s extruder build instructions recommend the use of springs to keep tension on the idler to help grip the filament. I’m not sure if there are some standard springs that will fit, or if people are making their own. I didn’t fancy much making the springs myself so I looked on ebay for something suitable. I found these springs that were cheap (25 for 99p), they measure 9mm in dia by 9mm long with a wire dia of 1mm. They fit fine around the M4 bolts and held in place by M5 large washers and M4 wing nuts. They seem to give plenty of force when tightened up, if one spring on each bolt is not sufficient I do have room to double up to increase the load. The M5 washers do clash a little but by rotating them I can get them to move past each other.

Getting the idler bearing on the short piece of M8 bar was not fun, if doing this yourself I recommend using a short bit of M8 threaded rod, the bearing will fit much easier.

See my previous post here on how I made the hot end.

Here are some pictures of the build.


From Mendel


From Mendel


From Mendel





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