1st Replication and design improvement

Today I managed to make a clone of a clone on my 3D printer, something I have wanted to do for well over a year now.

It's not quite full Reprap machine replication, but a good start, and one that makes me smile :)

I decided to print out a Hinged Accessable Geared Wade extruder by  GregFrost


It's a really good design and printed out very nicely, check it out on Thingiverse, it's extruder design evolved to near perfection.
I printed a set of Heringbone gears to use on it, but I was so impressed with the way the 'normal' gears printed and worked, I decided to stick with them for now.

My wooden Bowden extruder printed the Clear PLA one and that just printed the yellow one with a small design improvement.

I wanted to see if running a direct extruder improved my prints over the Bowden setup, it is a slightly larger nozzle size and I'm experimenting with different coloured 3mm PLA at the moment so it's not a fair test quite yet. I'll let you judge if the prints are any better or not, I am now also running twice as fast so when I go back to my Bowden setup I'll need to speed that up also.

0.2mm Layer height, 2 outline shells, normal hinged idler

With this hot-end I have used just PTFE for the hot-cold transition zone, it stays cool-warm to the touch and no leaks so far.

Little tip for anyone putting wires on the tiny little thermistors - cover both legs in Kapton first, the crimp lower down and wrap each connection with more Kapton and then more Kapton around the whole lot.

 I found I was using a screwdriver to lever back the idler to remove and insert filament and generally clean out the hobbed bolt, so my minor improvement to Greg's design is shown below.

And this was the copy, with my own improvement to the idler, it has a built-in lever so you can pull it back to insert filament without undoing the sprung bolts.

I hacked it up in Sketchup, so if it is of any use to anyone else, maybe Greg or someone can make it an option in the OpenSCAD original?

This is also my first part from Sketchup - to- 3D printer, now I have that workflow going I'm going to design a few things...

That's all for now, thanks for reading.

Rich.

Edit -  I almost forgot that I had never toasted my printer, this seemed like a good point so I printed out a Shot glass and had a drink... and another... and anotttther... and nnatnother...........

And it water-tight !