New Wade extruder for Skeleton 3D

thingiverse

After assembling Catastrophe's innovative little Skeleton 3D printer, there was one aspect about the printer that failed to meet my expectations: the extruder. It functioned perfectly well with PLA but consistently jammed when printing ABS. This occurred because ABS is both softer and more slippery, and the extruder was designed and engineered specifically for PLA by its creator. I reached out to one of my closest friends, a retired teacher with expertise in design using Inventor, to assist in redesigning and drawing a new extruder. This updated model should be based on a Gregs-Wade extruder and installed on an adapted X-Y carriage. Additionally, we included a 30mm fan to cool the J-head. The extended screw next to the J-Head serves as a support structure to attach the wires for the heater cartridge and thermistor using tie-raps. To improve reliability, we utilized the standard Wade Big and Wade Small gears from the REPRAP wiki page of the Prusa Mendel i2, making slight modifications to make them more substantial. I will provide further details in the following steps. Instructions I have also included the STEP files for adaptation purposes if needed. The FAN.STP and JHEAD_NOZZLE.STP are provided as additional references for completeness.