After long thinkering I decided to install one of those “improved” extruder mods for the TwoUp. Despite the overshadowing “Never Change A Running System” commandment haunting the gyri of my brain I did. Cause living on the edge ‘n stuff. You know.
Had printed DDeGonge888’s (no offense but what a ridiculus difficult nick to remember) extruder (version 7.0 as the time of writing – Download here ) and liard’s (much easier nick) extruder. Download here.
At first I wanted to install liard’s but came to the conclusion that is just too much of a fiddling and went with gonge’s extruder. Unfortunately. Because laird’s extruder had some nice fan pipes to direct the fan’s airflow directly to the hot-end.
On gonge’s extruder I had to sand off corners to make the two parts fit snug and maaaaayyybe took of a little too much. Anyways take a look.
Now the problem with the fan. Attaching it to the stepper is just uncool because everyone does and no…Actually it is too far away from the hot-end to cool the filament quick enough. So what to do ? I just turned the MDF spacer, which was not screwed at the top hole, down until it had the right angle for the fan duct (download) to direct airflow to the print. Looks unscripted but should get the job done.
Instead of the printed spacer for the spring I found that some old rod connectors for an airplane model had just about the right size to fit the spring and the M3 screw. The one I used is Graupner No. 1173.
So what changed now ? Did it improve ?
Well, I won an additional 1″ print area on the X-axis. Now I have a 16x16x11cm print area.
After installing the fan-mod I had to substract 5mm. Else the fan would run into the Z-axis rod. No big deal.
The cooling properties should have improved. I need to test this though.
Filament is much easier to change and feed into the extruder. Although you are not able to see inside the extruder which is kind of annoying but all in all it is quite okay.