Enraged wrote:If you are going through this much work, have you considering designing an extruder specifically for the ORD Bot? Possibly intergrate the metal carraige plate and its mounting holes into the design? If the big gear was on the makerslide side of the plate, that would make the whole thing more compact.
Completely agree - i am hoping someone comes up with a better design than whats currently on offer, no disrespect to the wonderful folks and hard work that went into getting DIY 3D printer technology this far - but considering how fast, sleek, inexpensive and elegant the ORD-bots are in comparison, i think (pardon the pun) that a quantum-leap in extruder technology is needed here. I know Bart did some work early on in this direction but luckily for us he focused his efforts in a different direction which brought us Makerslide and OrdBots. Though i'd love to tinker with it, I also have enough on my plate to keep me buried in projects for the next decade-
But i do have a bunch of ideas i'd bring to the discussion if someone wants to work on this problem with a community of motivated future customers online here to support that
I think most of the current designs are what they are in part due to the expected constraint that they should be printable - nice if you're entire printer platform is printable, but as the ORDbot has shown (which isnt) that's and extremely limiting constraint when it comes to cost, performance, and and a lot of other aspects. So for an ORDstruder i'd strart with a blank slate and specifically rule out self-printability as a requirement. And set a speed objective of 1m/s. That probably implies a longer heater tube, to give time for heat to penetrate the filament.
Using cheap commercial geartrain is OK. Even laser-cut acrylic would probably be better. hell why not more timing belt & pulleys since they're already a major part of the ORD design? Plus there are some pretty cool engineering plastics you can get now that are great at high temperatures, lubricious, or insulating, even all 3, that can be cut on a laser cutter, or CNC-machined, for housing and brackets and such.
For really high temp stuff you can even get 3D printed ceramics (and cheap too) from Shapeways. Even stainless steel and other unexpected cool materials.