Thermoplast Extruder Variations
Contents
Design
- Direct Drive -Does not use flexible steel cable
- No-support gear bush holder
- High-temperature heater design
- Very simple nozzle
- Nozzle valve
- Embedded bearings
- Hardware Store (HS) Extruder
- Geared - Goes slower, but provide more control on the amount extruded
- Grub Screw in lower end of PTFE Insulator to help hold the brass barrel when using higher temperatures
- Drive screw can be smooth for most of it's length. It reportedly only needs about 7 complete threads to dig in, the rest just add friction.
Materials
Barrel
- Machined out of a brass bolt.
- Aluminum has been used successfully.
- Combination of stiff copper tubing and copper plate brazed together was used by Forrest Higgs.
Orifice
- Mechanical pencil tip was reported to have heating problems.
Barrel dielectric material
- Furnace cement is now the officially recommended material.
- Both High-Temp JB weld and bar-b-que paint degrade after a hundred hours or so.
Pump
Insulator
- Originally designed to be made from PTFE (Teflon
- PEEK (w/o fiberglass reinforcement is reported to work)
- Concrete has been reported not to work (tried by vik, who still hasn't supplied details)
- Drywall mud (shrinks and cracks horribly, tried by John Gilmore)