I got the extruder fully assembled, attaching the hot-end to the cold and clamping it all to a static location. I then connected the extruder motor and hot-end to the Gen6 electronics and launched RepSnapper. I knew from hand feeding 3mm PLA filament through the hot-end that it would melt it fine, and from my temperature testing I now knew it could sustain temperatures on the hot-end and not get hot up along the feeder tube once the little 25mm fan was on. It was still interesting to see what might happen once I asked RepSnapper to "Run Extruder"! I made some little video-clips of the special occasion! :-)
This has been great progress. You will notice the extruding filament may seem a bit thick. I've a 1mm hole in the current nozzle, but now that I have it running in a very basic fashion, I'll swap it out for a .5mm nozzle and see how that goes. The extrusion tests in the video are with a RepSnapper manual "Run Extruder" settings of Speed=2000 and Length = 780. These are completely arbitrary units of measure I'm sure, as there are so many other factors at play here, i.e. gearing ratios, the nozzle hole diam. I'm going to have to do a bit more reading now that I have an extruder to test and calibrate! :-)
Thanks for viewing!
