Okay so I've had my RostockMaxV2 for a little while now and I love printing anything and everything. I knew from the get go that there were areas of this printer that could use improvements. I totally understand why the printer was designed the way it was, essentially to stay within a given price range. For majority of everything I've tried to print I've had a pretty good success rate.
What started this project was that blasted flex filament we all know as NinjaFlex. I've read that it's not good for bowden setups, but as I always do I ignored all the red flags and bought the material anyway. Lets not get into the fact that I took a pretty big printing job that required this filament and I've never printed with NinjaFlex before
After realizing how easily the extruder jams when trying to force this flexible filament thru it, I quickly realized I was in trouble. I did what anyone would do and go looking for answers. I did find a couple quick and dirty remedies. First being the one where you cut a piece of push to connect tubing and run it right up to the point of the extruder hoping the the filament will go thru it seamlessly with no trouble. This definitely made an improvement, but still jammed frequently. The second fix I found was to do the same thing, but with a piece of aluminum tubing. This was a big improvement over the push to connect tubing, but still jammed up.
I quickly realized that these solutions may only work with a bit of luck, but they are definitely not reliable solutions.
After a few days of thinking and thinking and thinking, I started to put together an idea to completely re-design the extruder that in theory should be jam free. After about a week I had down the prototype design pretty solid and it was time to make parts. Basically the reason EZstruder consistently jams with the flexible filament is because there is a lot of room around the hobbed gear that allows the filament to be sandwiched out in any direction possible. With my design there is only enough of a window cut out as ABSOLUTELY necessary so that the filament has no choice but to feed down the bowden tube. At least that's the idea. I won't know for sure until I finish a functional prototype.
I'm very early on in this project but attached below are some progress pictures and I will continue to update this thread as progress is made. I started off with the pivot arm that releases the tension on the filament so that you can easily load and remove the filament. I'm hoping within the next week I should have it all finished up.
