A lot of great ideas happen in the middle of the night, and for [Werner] it’s no different. One night he came up with an idea for a new 3D printer extruder, and after a very basic prototype, we’d have to say he might be on to something. It’s basically a deck screw acting as a worm gear to drive filament, but this simple idea has a lot of really cool advantages.
There are two really interesting features of this extruder, should [Werner] ever decide to flesh out his idea into a real prototype. First, the stepper motor for this extruder can be extremely small and mounted directly above the extruder. This opens up the doors to easily creating multi-extrusion printers that can handle more than one filament. Secondly, using a deck screw as a worm gear means there is a huge area of contact between the plastic filament and the driver gear.
Whereas the usual extruder setup only makes contact with the plastic filament along one or two splines of a hobbed bolt, [Werner]‘s design drives the filament along the entire length of the deck screw worm gear. This could easily translate into much more accurate extrusion without all the fiddling around with springs and hobbed bolts today’s extruders have.
In any event, it’s a very interesting idea, and we’d love to see [Werner] or someone else make a functioning extruder with this design.
Filed under: 3d Printer hacks
