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Yes, I know I’ve been a little bit quiet on here to the point where I haven’t posted in over a month. I’ve been fairly busy with home life (visiting friends on weekends etc) and working away from home in different parts of the country.

I’ve also been working on the design for a new 3D printer. As some of the more regular readers will know, I have/had an Anycubic Linear Plus (ALP) and an Anycubic Predator. Both with a number of upgrades, with the main one being duet 2 control boards. Well the ALP has been sold and I bought a Da Vinci Jr 1.0 for £35 + postage off ebay to tinker with.

The main reason I sold the ALP was to generate funds for a new printer. A coreXY in fact, with built in toolchanger. I was blown away with the possibilities of the E3D toolchanger when I was TCT but the ~£3000 asking price almost made me fall over (I was also impressed by the E3D Hermes and needed an excuse to buy a duet 3). Since then I’ve been researching different toolchanging printers (shout out to the Jubilee printer) to see which design I liked. I knew my next printer was going to be a coreXY and I knew I wanted something a little larger and I couldn’t really find anything I liked.

So Jays Toolchanger CoreXY was born. If anyone comes up with a better name, please let me know in the comments below.

I had a few design goals in mind. Namely I wanted to print roughly 500x500x500, use the duet 3 with toolboards, be fully direct drive and to use as many 3d printed or off the shelf parts as possible (as it stands at the moment, only the locking pin and bed need to be custom machined, although once the locking plate is easily available, I will swap to machined ones).

All files are currently available on Github and Thingiverse and comments on the design are welcome. I have tried to make it as accessible as possible. All of the design work is done in Solidworks.

As it’s all the rage these days, there is also a discord server. Come join me for a chat.

I will add another post with build progress.

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Whilst I was attending TCT today, E3D made an announcement about their new extruder, the E3D Hermes.

They have taken a dual drive extruder and created their own version. How is it different I hear you say? Well…

  • All of the gears are metal and fully hardened.
  • Each groove in the drive gear is custom milled (they have followed the crowd and announced they were manufactured on a swiss lathe), rather than using a tap.
  • There is no lubrication required due to the type of material chosen for the gears and the use of Igus bearings.
  • The extruder body is made of aluminium with optimised airflow, allowing for the use of lower powered fans. The airflow is directed upwards and away from the print area.
  • A custom nema 17 motor is used. The end caps od a standard nema motor are replaced with custom die cast and machined parts. These allow for the bearing recesses to become part of the motor casing. T-slots have also been machined into the caps to aid in extruder mounting and mounting other objects to the extruder, such as a BLTouch.
  • All items that require user interaction are at the top, such as idler tension and release.
  • It is smaller than their current titan aero extruders.
  • They are following Prusa and will be allowing the QC information of the extruder to be followed all the way through.

The E3D Hermes will be released as a complete package, contain the custom motor, extruder and hot end (including a nozzle, heater cartridge and thermistor).

I know what you’re thinking, this sounds expensive. They have made sure that the extruder can be manufactured using mass manufacturing techniques and have promised a price significantly less than £100.

The most crucial bit of information is when is it available? 4-6 weeks from now. So November.

Pictures of a production prototype and slides from the presentation are below. Ignore the PCB on the extruder, that is a whole other story…