Wednesday, January 13, 2010

PTFE connected without glue/epoxy

On my Extruder I wanted to attach the PTFE barrel without glue to maintain re-usability for future upgrades. To do that I used a hose clamp and hanger tape.

EDIT:
The hanger tape is held in place by lining up the perforated holes under the holes that mount the Extruder to the X-Carriage and bolting it all together like a sandwich.

Start by cutting off two short sections of the perforated metal. Sharply bend each into an L shape so that the holes will line up with the Extruder mounting holes. The difficult part is that the hanger tape doesn't like being bent into an L if it is also wrapped around a cylinder such as the PTFE. Clamp it on loose at first and the tightening force of the clamp will bend the metal into a tight fit.

Hanger tape is available in the plumbing section of the hardware store. Example picture here.

To slightly better explain how this works I created this crude drawing.



There is probably a more elegant way to achieve this especially if the Mendel Extruder part were modified.

As a bonus hanger tape also makes an excellent Opto Endstop trigger.

From No Glue PTFE


Monday, January 11, 2010

My Mendel is working!

From Mendel

The source of my PLA from UltiMachine.com without which I would not be able to print usable warp-free Mendel parts.

Try the latest development version of Kulitorum's RepSnapper from his SVN repository.

Full Story:
http://ultimachine.com/content/tonoks-mendel-printing


Video of first successful print on vimeo.


Thanks goes out to Kulitorum, JohnnyR and the #reprap channel for all your support.