Talk:Extruder/Mendel

Jkeegan 07:43, 7 November 2009 (UTC) - Referring to the Thermoplast Extruder Version 2.0 page for most of the instructions seems fine at first, but it does become a bit confusing once you've gone to the page and start looking at a bill of materials.. there's mention of pre-generation-3.0 electronics, for instance.. it took me at least a minute to realize that the PWM Driver 1.1, Stepper Motor Driver v2.3, and Thermocouple Sensor v1.0 were all unnecessary now that a generation 3 Extruder Controller board exists. Eventually the necessary (and only the necessary) pieces from the Thermoplast Extruder page should be duplicated/adapted into the Mendel extruder page (or alternatively, the Thermoplast Extruder page should be modified to make mention of which pieces to ignore/replace while building an extruder for Mendel).

Jkeegan 15:38, 2 January 2010 (UTC) - So, as I'm getting closer to actually being ready to permanently glue my favorite mendel RP piece to a PTFE barrel, I have to ask - can anyone that has a working Mendel (Adrian?) comment on whether there's some reason to believe that we'll need to replace the PTFE barrel less with Mendel? I've been using a MakerBot for a month and a half to make Mendel parts, and I've gone through at least four PTFE barrels (this last time, even with a hose clamp on it, extruding PLA). Even if that was just because of an initial learning curve, that would still seem to indicate that tying the fate of the RP'ed Mendel piece to the PTFE barrel is costly, no? Is there a reason why we shouldn't have some non-permanent attachment, where the PTFE is bolted via some washer or retainer ring as they have on the MakerBot plastruder? For instance, are there reasons against that related to tool switching in the upcoming Mendel updates, or does a damaged PTFE barrel break the pinch wheel piece anyway, or something along those lines? I'm a big fan of making the "official" RepRap versions as good as possible, and don't want to stray too much myself into custom modification land, lest we have an official mainline version that no one uses directly and has problems. (I'm also weakening on the idea of using that bucket of fire cement that I bought, what with kapton tape being cheap, but I haven't switched over on that idea yet). But I digress. Thoughts?