I built an INSANE Custom Extruder and it almost broke me | SDTX Extruder for my Delta 3D Printer

when you're designing something for performance it's wiser to ask how good it needs to be not how good it can be because those are often separated by a whole lot of work and only a little bit of good yet sometimes when you get an exciting idea for pushing a design to the very limit it's easy to tell yourself it'll be worth it no matter what this is a story about a time I told myself exactly that and paid for it so hard this is the story of sdtx [Music] a 3D printer's extruder is what drives the filament through the hot end a good one is strong but also light so it can go on the tool head without holding back the printer's acceleration extruders between 110 and 150 Gs are easy to find and light enough for most printers the bad news for me I don't run most printers I run a Delta Delta's minmax speed in exchange for a bonus penalty to Tool head Mass which means even very light rers are still comparatively heavy you can move to Bowden but this distance makes it hard to get accurate Extrusion at high speeds what is a determined Delta Runner to do get tricky that's what this is a flying extruder Delta style compromise notice how the extruder barely moves when it's mounted at the level of the carriages this means its mass has little impact on the motion system for horizontal moves which is awesome but there's a problem even this 20 cm boen tube is kind of a lot for printing at very high accelerations because it still needs a lot ofure pressure Advance we can cut down pressure Advance by lowering the extruder to shorten the Bowen except the shorter we make it the less physics hand waves away the extruder Mass so this is as far as the compromise goes that's what I thought but then I got this weird idea what if I made the flying extruder really long and left the stepper in the same place well I made this weird thing with a Nimble extruder and guess what it actually worked just not well enough with the Nimble I thought I was dead in the water but then somebody clued me into mellow selling Canon internals sets I was all in with this so here's what I came up with it worked well enough that even the first version could print its own replacement parts but it still took a lot of revisions to dial in the print quality and make it look [Applause] nice turns out extruders are hard to design who knew so in the end I had a design that printed well it looked good and it weighed about 50 g that's a win except this is carbon strike and 50 G is about 85% of the tool head Mass also besides the torque tube there's no carbon here could I make it lighter and more carbony of course I suffer from engineering micro optimization disorder Here's the final beta version how did I strip weight out of this first I made it into a carbon fiber truss Pros 1/3 less plastic stronger looks rad cons I actually have to build it and ironically most of the weight savings comes from the hardware side aluminum Fasteners instead of Steel making the tension arm a carbon spring to ditch the tension spring a knob trading the steel hinge pin for carbon and swapping the 5 G M10 Bowden fitting for a super light e3d collet my estimates said this should weigh 33 G but in a fit of pragmatism I decided to shoot for 35 G I also made this custom support scaffold to hold it together for the build it had to be strong because if the part spacing didn't stay perfect this whole thing would be a waste of time so I made it very strong and now for that build looks easy right [Music] [Music] I cut all the carbon fiber with my handy dandy cutting guide thin stuff like this can be roll cut easily with a utility blade as you can see I cut carbon fiber wet and wear a mask that dust is bad [Music] [Music] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 2 3 4 5 6 [Music] 9 all I want next I went to flush the jar with fresh water this was a mistake I washed one of my pieces of carbon fiber down the drain I hope it's somewhere in this m yuck success didn't even make it to the P trb well don't judge what does your plumbing look like inside have you checked no oh gross save it and [Music] sound I made a shocking Discovery while cleaning up the pieces these all look the same I realized I needed to get organized to have a prayer of making this happen [Music] after sorting the pieces I studied my design and planned out my Approach I'd be using 5-minute epoxy so I wanted to do a series of glue-ups in stages the first one would be the most critical when the plastic scaffold was the only thing holding the parts together so I thought hard about the best pieces to start with with I knew I had to lock down the structure so it would be hard to mess up later I knew I was procrastinating I was genuinely scared to get started how scared just watch my hands [Music] a one a [Music] [Music] two you [Music] 28 pressure to make it very difficult to mess this up [Music] dimensionally all right [Music] oh poop that was not the one that I meant okay so that one is S5 that was a silly goof this is six prely that's not the right one that's S1 now I don't have a choice grief I have so much crap on my hands right now how am I going to restrain this [Music] adequately okay I think we're good okay we got u3 u4 U1 U2 all the s's except for S2 T1 T2 which leaves us 1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 [Music] 6 should so much because this is stressful I have should you be doing it right now yeah got a short amount of I've Got 5 minutes to to do [Music] [Music] this [Music] last shoot shoot shoot shoot shot [Music] that is that is bad it just broke off in there see if we can pop that out I don't see that happens before so we're going to Quick clean this up and we'll just do another patch of epoxy real quick W okay take two a fresh piece cut and sand [Music] just a littlex way around this Rim let go this is just roen on me thank you very much uh [Music] come on in you go in you go so this has broken on me I'm going to clean this back off poop I'm going to make this work somehow I was trying to wrap this carbon fiber ribbon around this it's a very tight radius apparently too tight lesson learned for next time anyway we are going to try to to fix it going to wrap one over the other glue it down should be just as strong there hopefully that'll work provided it does not break further this will be okay doesn't have to be pretty it just has to let that epoxy cure what a pain okay remember how I said I made the scaffold very strong yeah it was about this point that I realized that the only way to get it out would be to systematically destroy it without damaging anything no pressure [Music] I need a break I really can't overstate how stressful this part was it was slow it was hard this pla did not want to break apart and I was just waiting for something to crack as I worked oh yeah and it took over for an hour to [Music] finish progress [Music] some Nippers would have made this so much easier just like an alligator take a bite and roll and don't scratch the thrust bearing mou faces cuz elat don't care about that part not quite sure which direction I thought that was coming out be coming out the top [Music] gotcha oh are you just going to come out you blessed little thing Hallelujah all right moment of [Music] truth that'll do it actually came out I couldn't believe how strange and cool it looked in person with no plastic between the pieces I was so relieved but wasn't out of the woods yet either all right step the first we need to make apart the old unit that's step the first holy cow I don't know how many stuff this has been and take the parts that we are going to use Parts harvesting here was pretty quick thanks to that Hardware weight savings I mentioned before next I get to assemble the sdtx and finally find out if the structure is On Target dimensionally did I mention this has to be plus orus 0 5 mm to work at all first Big Moment of Truth oh that does feel like the right distance apart oh my stars that looks so good that's nice and constrained still spins look at that that just slotted in perfectly those faces are the right distance apart despite the complexity of this particular design I find this approach with carbon fiber inserts has many positives strength and lightweight are two obviously but it's also surprisingly affordable in fact all the carbon fiber stock for this build cost me a grand total of $272 us yeah and of course there was shipping and I have a lot of stock left over but on a per part basis that's a lot of bang for the [Music] buck oh no we just put it on backwards much better some good grip [Music] [Music] okay that feels that doesn't feel smooth one of these here bearings is unhappy which one oh I think that be is really we will replace it okay that's feeling good now um Know lesson learned don't pound on nice bearings [Music] oh pee PE I completely forgot to put this on the scale before I had the two in it all right well I definitely want to do [Music] that one disassembly later yes very nice very very nice it was an incredible feeling to see this completed on the scale and under Target weight and after all my stress about breaking it this fragile looking truss not only came out good as perfect dimensionally it also proved ridiculously strong now there was only one thing left to do try it out [Music] [Music] [Music] come here [Music] [Music] just smile [Music] [Music] [Music] here's how those prints turned out the Extrusion quality isn't perfect but for day one prints on a novel extrus I'm still learning to tune I think these look great so am I happy was it worth it oh yeah this build was challenging in all the wrong ways but the outcome is just so good I love this extruder it's Unique it's seriously strong it's super light without sacrificing the features I wanted and the exposed gears are so much fun to watch I think it's the perfect crazy addition to my crazy crazy printer now before you go asking cool where are the files look I don't release every design I make sometimes that's because something is too Niche or took too much work to just throw out for free sometimes though it's because I have to protect people from themselves I love sharing inspiring ideas and I hope sdtx inspires you to make something cool it'll just you know have to be something else for your own good thanks for watching oh shoot how have I still not made a video about boom box grief stay tuned

Channel: James Pray

Views: 59,254

Keywords: 3DPrinting, Extruder

Id: PCupljR5pPc

Length: 22min 38sec (1358 seconds)

Published: Sun May 19 2024