Extruder Experience

In 2010 I bought the plastics for the Wade's Extruder from nophead as per this blog post. As mentioned in today's earlier post, I have have also purchased a hobbed bolt and Mk2 HotEnd from parcan.

I must say, I was very impressed with parcan's service. Rapid delivery, nicely packaged, and it looks like everything I should need. I'll go through this in detail below.

Hobbed Bolt

The package arrived with 2 bolts and a normal and nyloc nut. I thought I was only buying 1 bolt, so that was a nice surprise (hope that's what parcan meant to do and I didn't get someone else's package). I was impressed with the "hobbing", so much so that I'm glad I didn't even try to do it myself. The only observation was that it was a very tight fit to go through the bearing. Looking closely I noted that it was probably just the "swarf", so I put the bolts into my pillar drill and held a piece of fine sandpaper to them for a few sections. no both go through the bearing quite easily (I was concerned that if I forced it thro

ugh I wouldn't be able to dismantle the extruder in the future).

Before and after pictures below:

Parcan Mk2 Hot End

Firstly, here's a picture of the include parts. Great, no hunting around for bits, everything is there and assembled. Not only that, the kit includes a spare resistor and thermistor.

The first thing I noted is that this hot end uses a PTFE sleeve instead of the machined PTFE of old. The only repercussion for me is that my Wade's extruder has a 3 mm hole for the filament, I will need to drill this out. I also noted that the PTFE sleeving seems a bit long. I presume this is in case people are using a different design of extruder. Here are some before and after pictures of the extruder frame with modifications:

I then went ahead and assembled the extruder. See below. The biggest issue was that I was struggling to get the "hobbed" bit of the bolt centred while still having enough clearance on the gear for the motor screws. I then measured the depth of the bolt head hole in the gear and realised that I could force it in further. This solved the problem.

Installation of the extruder will have to wait until I have the electronics working.