1 Topic by Strooder (edited by Strooder 2014-05-02 18:40:16)

  • Strooder
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Topic: Strooder- New Filament Extruder

Over the past few months, myself and a team of robotics engineers have been working on a new filament extruder.

The current extruders on the market just didn't cut the mustard in our eyes. We wanted a compact, quality and reliable product that incorporated an easy to use UI with pre-sets for all material extrusion, whilst allowing customisable settings to be selected.

We wanted to connect with you guys and keep you updated with our progress.

In the last few days we have finished the outer shell of the Strooder and we we be filming our Kickstarter video next week. Yesterday we were also featured on 3dprint[.]com check it out.

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2 Reply by tealvince

  • tealvince
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Re: Strooder- New Filament Extruder

Interesting visual design. 

However, the lack of a post-extrusion fan or support mechanism, or even any photos or videos of actual working units or internal mechanisms concerns me that product might still be in a really early development phase, as it doesn't look like it would work as pictured.

Also, if a filastruder, with a much longer shaft still has problems mixing subtle color shades, I can't imagine you could do so at all in such a compact space.

3 Reply by Strooder

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Re: Strooder- New Filament Extruder

Thank you,

We have attached a photo to the original post and you can check out more information over at the 3dprintboard so that you can fully understand our design and how we are approaching the mentioned challenges. Just search Strooder and it will all be explained!

4 Reply by tealvince

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Re: Strooder- New Filament Extruder

I'd visited the other links.  Same concerns, maybe even more.

I've learned from my experience with my extruder (Filastruder) that filament coming out of a nozzle is still molten and soft and has almost no rigidity, so it needs both a way to actively cool it after extrusion and some support to keep the weight of the printed filament from stretching, kinking, or tearing off the filament at the nozzle.  Laying out the support and final filament path is non-trivial, and most are gravitating to vertically-fed designs due to kinking difficulties.

The Strooder has a horizontal path with neither a fan nor support, so while I like compactness of the proposed inner mechanism (I could only find pictures of a digital mock-up, not an actual device), I don't think the full unit would work as designed.  I see some good ideas and well-rendered mockups, but no evidence that the hard prototyping work has been completed.  I stand by my skepticism that there is anything here but Vapor (yet). 

Caveat Emptor.

5 Reply by Strooder

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Re: Strooder- New Filament Extruder

Hi tealvince and thank you for your response,

The cooling of the filament actually happens within the extruder as there is a cooling system built within the case. We are aware that previous attempts at creating a filament extruder have resulted in filament extruding with various complications, such as kinks or tearing of the filament.
The design we have created was intended to tackle these issues and from testing to date we seem to have managed to have solved these issues despite the observations you have picked up on.

The Strooder is currently extruding near enough perfect filament which has been tested on various printers; here is an image of a calibration cube we created using Strooder filament:

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