Nate True’s Extruder Hacks
Nate True is an old buddy of mine from Seattle and shepard of the great site cre.ations.net. He’s hotrodded his extruder! Check it!
After some failures Wednesday and today, my dad and I came up with some fixes to the extruder that have made it work fantastically now.N
The first failure was the PTFE barrier bulging out and leaking ABS all over the place – we solved that by using a new PTFE barrier and surrounding it with a 1/2″ copper pipe slip joiner with a slot hacksawed lengthwise into it so that it could change size and slip around the barrier. Then we used hose clamps to clamp really hard down on the copper fitting so that it would not bulge out. There’s a heat sink on there too but we are not sure whether it’s really helping any. Sure looks cool though!
The other failure was the insulator retainer plate starting to crack due to the high pressures. I had the genius idea to put the screws right into the plastruder body, rather than using the plate at all, and was surprised to find out that it all fit together just fine that way. Now the tension is on three parallel plates of acrylic rather than bending a single plate of acrylic around a bend.
The last fix is one that I’ve had on for a long time, that’s the M6 nut around the heater barrel which makes sure the heater barrel is pushed into the PTFE barrier threads, rather than the barrier threads being the only thing holding the heater barrel on. I didn’t have an M6 nut so I just used pliers to make a makeshift nut out of very small brass tube. It works fine!
I post hoping others will find solutions to their extruder problems and that others will suggest more solutions.
More info like this is awaiting your eyeballs in the MakerBot Google Group.
MakerBot Update – Extruder Postmortem « Built to Spec
December 6th, 2009 at 10:23 pm #
[...] out this entry on the MakerBot Blog for some additional info and some more awesome mods to the basic plastruder [...]
Insulator Retainer Breakage « Makerbot #448
March 15th, 2010 at 9:23 pm #
[...] Insulator Retainer Breakage 16 03 2010 For those of you who have a broken insulator retainer, superglue seems to work well to fix it temporarily (or forever). Some sanding might be necessary to make stuff fit in holes. Then to make sure it doesn’t break again, put the screws holding the extruder upside down and screw those long screws into the extruder body directly. Much stronger and robust. See here for more details on this configuration: http://blog.makerbot.com/2009/11/29/nate-trues-extruder-hacks/ [...]