MakerBot Industries

The page http://wiki.makerbot.com/bowden currently redirects to this page as all the information regarding the bowden extruder is currently located on the MK5 extruder page. Should a situation occur in the future where there are several Bowden designs or ideas it might make sense to place content on the bowden page. To do this the redirect should be removed to allow the page to be edited, to do this click the link below:

http://wiki.makerbot.com/bowden/noredirect/true

This is neat, I'm interested with where the extruder is going.
Sadly, all the links fail, and attempting to locate starting from the root of the svn brought up nothing. I'd like to see where the files are and work on my own iteration, just to keep up with my variations.

I recently had a filament guide fail at the nut slot below the idler (the one that carries the heater unit) and I was thinking that putting these two nut slots in the split filament guide piece weakens them and it would be better, if I were redesigning it, to put one nut slot in the piece above and one in the piece below, which are thinner, but continuous plastic. Probably moot, considering Mk 5 is hastening down the pipeline, but if there is a similar decision to be made about the position of nut and bolt slots in the MK 5 design I hope this is considered so that fewer acrylic fails happen in future designs. Of course the thinner plastic pieces might fail more, I don't know, but it seemed worth thinking about.

In a Google Group post Zach confirmed that the Mk5 was released to production in June 2010. They expect 6-8 weeks till units are available. Maybe mid august.

Very nice! When can we expect the full Makerbot kits to be shipping with the new MK5 extruder?

Not sure why, but the resistance all wired up is 3.2 instead of 2.5… Can't figure it out. one resistor gives me 5.6 ohms the other 5.9 does the bolts and aluminum effect this reading? New multimeter time? Any help is good thanks.

It would be good to include here some tips on where to locate the extruder control board. The Mk5 is narrower than Mk4 and you can not mount controller directly to it. The ggroup has some tips (mostly under the "Just Released" thread):
- use upper opto endstop mounting holes + some new ones on side above mother board
- use Printruder II PCB holder
- use Shapelock and mount it direct to motor
- adding terminal block on top of extruder and running other wires to controller on side

I'd like to see some more pics of what is used on Cupcake + Mk5 + relay at MBI itself, and other bot farms.

Hi, my name is Andy, I'm 10 and I've been working on this with my dad. everything works great except the extruder doesnt heat up.

we've checked the ressistance at the heaters and we get about 2.5 ohms after we take out the error in the meter.

what voltage readings should we see (or current) when the heater is turned on? the thermistor works great (measures the right room temperature), and we have a connection to the extruder because we've been able to control all theother components and upgrade the extruder firmware to 2.5/with relays.

any ideas? again, motors work great, heated build platform checks out, just extruder heater not working.