Vaeder V-struder Belt Drive Cold End Extruder

Martijn Vaeder devloped a novel cold end extruder which drives the filament with belt drive. Here is what he says abut his invention:

The idea for this new type of cold end came to me through having a lot of frustrating experiences with the Greg Wade's cold end, such as frequent slipping of the filament, the drive wheel grinding into the filament, the deformation of the filament which causes extra friction in the PTFE tubing and overall lack of force to extrude the filament. I thought "why couldn't you exert force on the filament from both sides of the filament by adding gears between the drive wheel and the flywheel?".

Early prototypes showed me that this improved the extrusion performance significantly. Unfortunately it still deformed the filament the same way as the Greg Wades cold end. Therefor I thought: "what if you increase the contact area between the filament and the drivewheels, so you can reduce the force pressing down on the filament while increasing the extrusion force?". This brought me to using a belt and wheel to clamp the filament between, which gave very promising results during early prototyping. Now many iterations down the line I present to you the Vaeder curved and geared cold end.

Here is the demonstration of an early prototype:




Here is a very detailed assembly guide video:





3DHubs forum thread abut this extruder:

https://www.3dhubs.com/talk/thread/new-type-cold-end-vaeder-v-struder

GitHub repository with all the files needed to print it yourself:

https://github.com/Vaeder3D/

You can buy it  here for some 41 euro:

https://reprapworld.com/?products_details&products_id/1134/cPath/1616_1668#.Vp950fnhCUl

V-struder schematics that clearly shows angles of filament, gears and belt drive

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