Genealogy / Archeology of the Greg's Wade's Geared Extruder
In this page I will illustrate (to the best of my knowledge) how the original design for the Wade's geared extruder has evolved in the last few years. Nowadays (early 2015) this extruder design is probably the most popular single extruder design among reprappers worldwide, and it has spawned countless remixes. It would be impossible to account for all the variants of this design available on the web but I will try my best to show its main "evolutionary line".
1st Gen: Wade's original design
This is actually documented right here in the wiki: Wade's_Geared_Extruder and you can find all the files for it on that same page.
Now, I understand that the original Wade's geared extruder from February 2010 is itself an evolution of an earlier extruder design by Adrian Bowyer and also includes many ideas from Nophead's early research on extruders. It seems it was not designed in OpenSCAD and I don't have any information on what CAD program Wade used.
All the files for this early extruder design are still available both here on RepRap.org and also on Thingiverse, however one should note that it has been improved upon. See below.
2nd Gen: (Gregs's) Accessible Wade's Extruder
This was published on Thingiverse in February 2011 i.e. about a year after the publication of the original Wade's extruder.
The OpenSCAD source includes references to Josef Prusa's GitHub repository so I imagine the extruder was designed to be used with the Prusa Mendel, at the time the "current" Prusa design.
File header:
- // Greg's Wade Extruder.
- // It is licensed under the Creative Commons - GNU GPL license.
- // © 2010 by GregFrost
- // Extruder based on prusa git repo.
About a month later Greg published version 2 of his extruder, which is pictured below:
(add picture)
