Generic Wades Extruder

thingiverse

You can use this design to significantly boost the torque of any extruder that is connected with 4 M3 bolts and nuts in a square configuration, measuring 31mm. You can reuse all existing parts and insert this "gearbox" between them. To do so, you will need some additional M3 bolts, nuts, and an axle or nail measuring 5mm. This setup greatly improved skipped steps for me. Later on, I further enhanced it by increasing Vref to 1V2 (0V6 in manual) - check out the Benchy before and after. The gear ratio is 1:3. As a result, after installation, you will need to multiply your Esteps/mm x3 and reverse your extruder motor direction (e.g., Menu - Control - Motion + Store). To lock the gears in place, you'll need to flatten the nail on the positions of the screws through the gearshafts. I achieved this with a dremel or multigrinder. When considering this design, keep in mind the following: Increase Vrefs for your stepper drivers (don't worry if it's double the value; just ensure that temperature levels of drivers and motors are okay). Check the temperature with your finger to avoid overloading your equipment. Don't block your nozzle or bowden tubes on the Geeetech Rostock 301: always have three filaments loaded. Push some filament through before and after each print, and incorporate it in your start/stop scripts if possible. 29/Apr/2017: I added a new basic gear pair with fewer teeth. After three months, my small gears started to wear out slowly, so I decided to create something more robust. Not yet tested as of today. May/2017: spray some WD40 on all moving and turning parts! No squeaking noises anymore, no melting plastics, and no skipped steps at all! Dec/2017 - 1: I added BasePlate2, a version with holes that allow you to tighten the bolt on the big gear without having to take the whole thing apart (yep, I had it loose at some point). Dec/2017 - 2: I added Extruder_SimpleGear_Driver_NoScrollingOnAxis, a version with non-circular axis hole. This requires removing 1mm of material from your extruder axis so that the gear can be put on. Mar/2019: I removed these from my printer because I realized that the stepper motor I mounted this on isn't capable of reaching the required speed! It starts to skip steps/shake/make 'brrr'-noises as the motor can't keep up with the steps it gets fed per second (after all, the motor has to rotate 3 times as fast as in the original setup). Maybe for your motor it works fine, but I'm giving it another try without this Wades setup.