New year, new extruder?

The RepRap design has always aimed to be cheap and easy to make from readily available materials. What I desire though is good performance and reliability, and put those priorities ahead of the others. To me they are absolute requirements and the others are things to be optimised afterwards. With that in mind I set about trying to design a reliable extruder that I can make with the tools and materials I have available.

As it is experimental I wanted it to be modular so I can swap out things that don't work. I started with the heater. It takes me two days to make one so I wanted it to be removable and reusable. I made an aluminium bobbin with an M6 thread through the middle of it so it can be fitted to different barrel designs. The outside diameter is 12mm and the inner diameter is 8mm. It is also 12mm long. The flanges are 2mm and 3mm with a 7mm gap for the nichrome and Cerastil.



The surface is roughed up to make the Cerastil adhere well. It has a hole to accept the thermistor to make it a self contained closed loop.

I put down a layer of Cerastil about 0.5mm thick using a plastic jig and left it to cure over night.





I used two strands of 0.1mm nichrome in parallel to make the heater. That only needs 90mm to make about 6Ω. I normally use 8Ω but I anticipated more heat loss in this design.

To make connections to the heater I used two strands of 0.2mm tinned copper wire and attached them with reef knots.


I then covered the knots in high melting point solder.

Using such fine copper wire may be a mistake as Bert pointed out on my previous post. Time will tell.

I made a jig to keep the wire taught while winding it on the bobbin.



At this diameter it is only about three turns of nichrome.

Finally I covered the windings in Cerastil H-115 and also used it to glue in the thermistor.



I made the barrel as short as possible. That turned out to be 25mm to have room for the heater and the nozzle and a mounting flange. The standard design uses a 45mm heater barrel.



The vaned section is a heatsink to keep the rest of the filament path cool. Sandwiched between the hot and cold sections is a 12mm length of 10mm diameter PTFE tube.



The idea is to keep the thermal transition as short and slippery as possible to make it easy to push the slightly molten plastic through. The PTFE extends 5mm into the heatsink to give a good contact area for cooling. It extends 2mm into the hot barrel and 5mm is in the air gap. It is an interference fit and is under compression. When it gets hot and expands the seal should only get tighter.

The metal parts were drilled to 3.3mm on the lathe and once assembled it was all drilled out to 3.5mm. As the PTFE was drilled in situ the hole is perfectly aligned and there are no gaps.

The thermal loss through PTFE, which has a conductivity of 0.25 W/m°C, will be: -

220 × 0.25 × π (0.005² - 0.00175²) / 0.005 =0.76W, assuming the heatsink is at 20°C and the barrel is at 240°C.

The barrel is held on by three M3×25 stainless steel bolts. The holes are counter bored so only the last 5mm of thread is in contact with the heatsink. Assuming the mean diameter of the thread is 2.75mm the heat loss through the bolts is: -

3 × 220 × 17 × π × 0.001375² / 0.02 = 3.3W

Longer bolts could reduce this by about half.

Here it is with the heater, nozzle and PTFE cover installed. There is heatsink compound between the heater and the barrel, and the nozzle thread is sealed with PTFE tape.



The wires are insulated with PTFE sleeving and terminated to a 0.1" header mounted on a scrap of Vero board. This mates with an old floppy drive power connector. I put the thermistor in the middle and the heater on the outer contacts so it doesn't matter which way round the connector goes.



The clamp seems to grip aluminium a lot better than it does PTFE but I also put an M3 bolt into a blind tapped hole to ensure it cannot slip. A good move as it turned out.

I powered it up without the pump and calibrated the thermistor. With the nozzle at 240°C the "cold" section reached 100°C and softened the ABS clamp. Obviously my home made heatsink is woefully inadequate.

To keep it cool I added a small fan. That keeps the cold section at 30°C, much better.



The black sheet is Teflon baking parchment that I used to stop the fan blowing on the hot section.

I haven't attached the motor yet but I have tested hand feeding white, green and black ABS as well as HDPE. The ABS feeds easily through the 0.3mm nozzle and the HDPE with moderate force. I think they will all work well with the motor drive.

When the filament is pulled back out only a few millimetres has expanded at the end. In contrast, without the fan the filament swelled most of the way to the top and jammed. You can see the difference here: -



Keeping the melted section short is the key to making the filament easy to feed. The other improvement is that the PTFE is no longer a structural element. It is held in compression and appears to make a good seal with simply a push fit.

I am sure I can both improve the thermal separation and make it easier to make with a couple of design iterations before redesigning the other half of the extruder.

Do we need nichrome?

While making a new heater I decided to try using stranded tinned copper tails rather than the solid tinned copper wire I used previously. The idea being to put less stress on the Cerastil covering.

I started with a standard piece of 7 x 0.2 stranded copper wire and removed the insulation. I found all seven strands too bulky so I decided to see how many strands I needed to carry 2A. I found that a single strand was cool to touch at 2A but very hot at 4A. I figured two strands would be sufficient for some margin.

The fact that a strand gets hot at 4A, and in fact red hot at about 5A, got me thinking that we could just use a single strand of copper for the heater. Nichrome is expensive, not that easy to obtain, and difficult to make connections to.

I measured the resistance of a strand 52cm long as about 0.3Ω (my meter only gives one digit). The strand measured 0.17mm diameter. Calculating its resistance from the resistivity of copper I get 1.72 x 10^-8 x 0.52 / (π (0.00017/2)²) = 0.39Ω.

At 4A the voltage drop was 2.6V giving a resistance of 0.65Ω and a power of 10W. The thermal coefficient of resistance is 0.0039 for copper so the calculated temperature of the wire is 20 + (0.65/0.39 - 1) / 0.0039 = 191°C. It was certainly hot enough to cut through ABS.

10W and 190°C are not far from the operating conditions of an extruder. I tried winding it on the bobbin I had made for my heater but it was about twice as long as I could accommodate. I am trying to make a very short heater at the moment so I went back to using nichrome. Also 2.6V @ 4A is too much for my current drive circuit but it would be easy to come up with a switch mode converter to drive it, or simply use the 3.3V rail of a PC PSU.

So it has definite possibilities. Making the connections would be trivial. Just start with a piece of 7 strand wire and cut it down to one apart from at the ends. Some high temperature solder would keep it neat but would not be essential. A standard heater barrel with some insulation would be about 7mm diameter so 24 turns would be required. If you keep it taught and wind it in a lathe or drill chuck you can get about 2 turns per mm with some concentration. That would easily fit the space currently allocated for the heater.

Simple experiment

Inspired by Demented Chihuahua's extruder work, I repeated his experiment using what was left of my old heater. I mounted it in a 30mm M6 stainless steel washer and clamped that in a vice. I used my 0.3mm aluminium nozzle, which I counter bored with a 0.7mm drill to reduce the depth of the 0.3mm hole to about 1.5mm.



I powered the heater from a bench power supply and adjusted it manually to about the right temperature. Green ABS is handy for this because it changes colour at 260°C so you can tell when it is too hot.

I can extrude filament by pushing it by hand with moderate pressure. It comes out at 0.4mm but I should be able to stretch it back down to 0.3mm without any problems. Even with a 0.5mm nozzle I can stretch it down to 0.3mm, but I lose positional accuracy because the orifice no longer defines exactly where the plastic goes.

Originally the heater was 5mm longer, with the excess protruding beyond the half nut. I found that cutting that piece off made it easier to extrude. It was probably a relatively cool section so the plastic remained very viscous there.

When a new piece of filament is inserted into the heater it extrudes very easily. After a while some plastic flows backwards and builds at the entrance to the heater. That causes considerable extra resistance. I plan to tackle that by having a short section of PTFE at the entrance with a heatsink the other side of it. The steep gradient across the PTFE should freeze the back flow over a short distance and, being super slippery, should allow it to slide back into the heater.

Another thing I tried was forcing out the plastic using the shank of a 1/8" drill bit as a piston. The further the drill got to the end of the heater the less force was needed to push it. That confirms what I had suspected. The force to push the plastic though the long 3.5mm section of the barrel is very significant compared to the force to squeeze it through the short small hole in the nozzle. So the heater needs to be kept as short as possible. Obviously there will be a point where the extrusion rate becomes limited by the rate the plastic melts if it is too short, but I expect that is much shorter than the current set-up.