clay extruder?

[cipherzero 0]

Does the Ultimaker support replacement extruder for printing clay and similar materials, like Hyrel 3d printer does? http://www.hyrel3d.com/emo-25/

 

[aviphysics 9]

Seems like in principle you could attach whatever you wanted, though you would have to do some work to interface it to the Arduino controller and its firmware. The controller and firmware is open source, so it is at least plausible.

 

[jhertzberg 19]

Since a clay extruder is cold, know that you will need to either rebuild Marlin to ignore MINTEMP errors, or add a resistor to supply a constant temp reading in the proper range.

 

[alluvian 0]

Love the idea of those extruders, but I imagine they are quite heavy. The main bonus for bowden feeding like on both ultimakers is to reduce the weight of the print head.

I would be concerned going with a printer specifically engineered to have a lightweight print head.

I would suspect a design with a sliding bed where the bed handles two axis would be best for a heavy head like this.

On the other hand, I think that the clay extrusion is meant to be done at pretty low speeds where the extra mass might not be an issue.

 

[jhertzberg 19]

I think that a delta configuration might be better than a sliding bed. The abrupt accelerations of a bed changing direction would likely collapse any delicate wet clay walls.

Nevertheless, clay extrusion with my UM1 is a back burner project for me. I started out with a moineau pump printed in PLA, but I'm now thinking that filling a big syringe, then gearing a motor to slowly press the plunger will be simpler. I want to avoid dragging the weight of the clay and a motor around, so I picked up some cheap 100cc syringes a while back and some tubing with the intent of seeing if there are any clays that would have low enough viscosity to impel through ~50cm of 3-4mm ID tubing, but would not buckle upon being extruded.

I don't have the workspace for using an air compressor, so that approach is out for me.

 

[owen 19]

Hey jhertzberg

I think you'll find on thingiverse some designs that use a syringe that is connected to the bowden and the normal feeding of the filament pushes the plunger. Very simple.

 

[jhertzberg 19]

Hi Owen,

The two I had seen at Thingiverse both mount the syringe on the head. In the other, the extruder motor pulls a strong thread back through a bowden to pull the plunger down. Of the two, the second seems more robust, and I have the parts for that, but with both I'll be dragging around a lot of weight on the head, and clays probably require more force on the plunger than can be had by pulling a string or pushing PLA. Those designs look more appropriate for frosting. My holy grail would be to be able to feed clay continuously, but that may be neither practical nor necessary.

 

Hey jhertzberg

I think you'll find on thingiverse some designs that use a syringe that is connected to the bowden and the normal feeding of the filament pushes the plunger. Very simple.

[owen 19]

Yep, I see. They don't exactly look developed for clay.

I'm looking forward to see what you come up with. Please keep us posted.

 

[jhertzberg 19]

Will do, but that will be after I finish converting to direct drive.