High-Ratio 3D Printer EXTRUDERS – MUST HAVE? or STUPID?

👉🏻 In this video I am testing if high ratio 3D printer extruders are viable or it is just stupid as currently nobody in the 3D printing market uses ratios that are so high. I made multiple test prints, comparisons, and full calculations to determine that and the results might surprise you.

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🕗 TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 - The question
01:06 - The 21.6:1 ratio extruder
01.46 - So much prep work...
03:24 - POM vs LR, input shaping, test prints, and first layer consistency
04:00 - TESTING & EXPLANATION
08:55 - Final thoughts

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#AnkerMakeM5C #Extruder #TEST

[PrintingPerspective]

ABOUT DISASSEMBLING STEPPER MOTORS:

"In principle, common stepping motors can be divided into two types: reactive stepping motor and hybrid stepping motor. The reactive stepping motor can be disassembled, while the hybrid stepping motor must not be disassembled. The mixed type mainly uses strong magnetic aluminum nickel cobalt material, which is high temperature resistant and does not demagnetize at high temperature. It is charged to saturated state during production. If it is disassembled, the magnetic circuit will no longer be closed, and the magnetic core will weaken. Special magnetizing equipment is required, which can not be solved by ordinary people. If neodymium iron boron material is used, it is not a big problem to disassemble it."

This is a shortened quote from casunsteppermotor.com website.

[VezD]

Awesome video. One thing though.. we should not care about gear ratio ... we should care about final drive on the system... the steps per mm is what matters to compare :)

[ebrewste]

The reflected torque is indeed reduced by the square of the gear ratio, but don’t forget that you motor inertia didn’t go down and you will need to accelerate at a much higher rate.

[kilianlindlbauer]

Good video as always.

Personally i prefer to compare extruders not by gear ratio, but by steps per mm or rotation distance. That gives you a clear loom of how a gearbox actually works as the output isnt always the same. As example a lgx and bmg both claim a 3 to 1 gear ratio, which is first of all nonsense, and second the lgx has lower e steps values than a bmg. The lgx has a two stage reduction rather than single stage like the bmg because of the large drive gears. So the 3 to 1 gear ratio only applies to one stage of the lgxs gearing, i dont know the exact teeth count, but if i had to guess it would be the first stage, stepper motor to intermediate gear. After that you still have the stage intermediate gear to feed gear. So overall a pretty high gear ratio (a 3 to 1 and another) but have pretty comparable overall reduction.

This is the same reason why belted z isnt more accurate or faster than leadscrew z, it depends fully on the steps per mm/rotation distance. I was going through a voron trident config and noticed that it had much lower z speed than a 2.4, 30mm/s vs 8mm/s, the comment after that said because leadscrew. BS i call it. I got 25mm/s in stealthchop and with 1k acceleration for out of it, with the fat 350mm bed

[Bidiversety]

I recently upgraded to large gear extruder stealthburner and the extrusion consistency is much better than even the integrated gears from mellow. Definitely recommend using large gear extruders over smaller ones for layer quality

[MrHeHim]

I'm here in 2024 still using a 1:1 direct drive extruder like its 2014 😅

One thing i noticed from my first printer is that the idler arm doesn't sit even with the extruder gear, rides a little lower. For the longest i thought it was just a mistake, but a few years ago i noticed the filament that rides though and gets the gear markings curls away from said markings. This is important because i found out it binds the filament. So instead of installing a H2 V2S Revo i just bought at the time when it was new (like 3 years ago) i simply slapped on the old extruder arm from my Replicator Dual and started to do some flow tests. Immediately noticed it was able to hit 22mm3s flow rate with a Frankenstein'ed volcano V6 half copper and hardened tip i made, up from 16mm3s. Then noticed there was slight deformation from the V shaped idle bearing when printing ABS enclosed so i designed a whole new arm with a larger U shaped idle bearing and then it went up to 26mm3s. Then coupled with the Microswiss CM2 hybrid copper Volcano nozzle with a small hardened tip, I'm printing everything at 26mm3s at low temps and can easily do 32mm3s with higher temps (within spec). I'm able to print at 40mm3s 10c over at 250mm/s 4K acceleration if i want to push it

This is using a Nema17 42x30 StepperOnline motor, even tried a 42x23 for fun.. limited to about 20mm3s flow. Original 42x36mm would start shredding the filament, while the 42x30 does show signs of slippage on the filament when pushed too much, it starts skipping.. which IMO is better to have at the limit, no more having to clean filament chunks.

My thesis being that filament binds on the walls, more so after heat soak. If you can feed the filament in "straighter" by compensating for the curl it will help avoid said binding

[petermeier]

When you are comparing ratios of extruders, are you taking the filament drive gear diameter into account? That 7.5:1 Orbiter ratio is just the ratio of the gearbox and/or differential if it were a car. But it has larger filament drive gears (wheels if it were a car) and thus not as much overall reduction when compared to Sherpa type extruders with 5:1 gearing and smaller filament drive gears.

[petermeier]

Regarding disassembling steppers: I have a LDO 20mm extruder motor which I've disassembled and assembled atleast 3 times. Can't tell a difference, still get around 40mm³/s out of it.

[toma.cnc]

Ouch, taking out a stepper motors rotor renders it unusable!
Very informative video, as usual, thank you.

[ameliabuns]

your channel is cool and has a lot of cool ideas to try! I wish you tried your ideas on something like a voron or ratrig tho!

[silent_woolf.]

I don't even have a 3d-printer but still loves your videos :)

[mp-xtrg]

So there's one big glaring issue with this whole thing. All the work you did isn't relevant because the extruder gear is much larger. Steps per mm of filament moved is what matters. I'm not sure what the numbers are but id guess the gear ratios are more or less the same given the difference in the final diameter of the drive wheels. Just as a jeep with 3.55 gearing and 28" tires goes the same speed at the same rpm as a jeep with 4.10 gearing and 31" tires.

[sobhanabedi]

This makes no difference. Gear ratio isn't just a ratio between smaller and larger meshed gears. There are other mechanical linkages in this system. like between the drive gears and the filament. Because these extruders use larger drive gears, The gear ratio between the drive gears and the filament is lower and when this value is multiplied by the 20-1 (or some like that) gear ratio, the value gets much lower and close to what was typical on older extruder systems. (the overall gearing of the system would be {gear ratio}/{rotation distance}. This should be the metric that we compare between different extruders). If we neglect the inefficiency in gear meshings, If the filament is moving at the same speed and with the same accelerations, The load on the motor would pretty much be the same. The only thing that changes is where on the torque-speed curve we hit the motor and this could be specifically designed for and since based on your calculations, we're not even close to motor limits, we'd better optimize for more efficient meshings (which in turn could even mean less load on the motor for the same performance) in the system, since the first gearing is between two hard materials and much more efficient than the meshing between the drive gear and the filament, It's only logical to take some load off the filament and add it to the first gearing and that's why everyone's moving toward higher gear ratio while increasing extruder's rotation distance.

[AustinDennis]

Neat! Now I gotta figure out the best way to add rails to my OG M5

[AdriFlashBack]

Hi, i just watched many of your videos, nice channel :) I have an old P3Steel printer based on prusa i3 wich is 12V, are there any good electronic kits to buy out there or should i buy a full 3d printer and upgrade it myself?

[EngrNuj]

shouldn't it be steps per mm? ratio doesn't matter much if your final drive gear isnt taken into account...

[aaamott]

Great job on the video! Been considering this as I seem to have reached the limit of my extruder.
I would love to see this test with a higher jerk value (can't think of the klipper term atm) and a lower smooth_time value (which should improve th initial underextrusion you were getting). Both cause the extruser to have to accelerate faster. Smaller smooth times make a difference on high accel prints. I had to decrease the value on my bowden setup to make it work well because I print between 30k and 100k and it looks way better at 0.035 than 0.04.

[_..-.._..-.._]

Is there a stl file for the linear rail x bracket? I tried using the discord but I can’t stand using it, it makes me login everytime I click a link and I don’t really understand it. Not sure if a step file would help me, I’m not really good at the software end of FDM printing.

[prxrb]

I would be very interested to see if there is any impact on extrusion consistency with large gear extruders. 0.1mm of extruder gear runout has much less of an effect on extrusion if the extruder gear has a 10mm radius, than if it has a 3mm radius.

[skaltura]

Reliability probably part of the reason -> Nozzle clogging? Bigger changes it just pushes it out