VM Extruder

After using a gregfrost extruder on my Prusa for a while, I decided I wanted to make a few tweaks to the basic design:

• replace the hobbed bolt (I found it too strip-prone) with a large-diameter filament driver that requires no machining

• a spring-loaded over-center latch on the idler arm, allowing opening the idler without unscrewing anything

• an idler arm that opens flat to provide even better access to inspect & clean the filament drive

After assembling it and running a few test parts, I put it to work building parts for sublime's printed lathe, around 45 hrs of runtime with 14 hrs for the longest single build, and didn't experience a single hiccup. I have since run it at up to 100mm/s, which it handles fine.

The extruder body has mounting provision for the Makergear hotend.

Zip file contains the Solidworks 2011 source files.