Farr0wn3d wrote:Does anyone else have any firsthand experience with Micron's components? This seems like an excellent concept, and should be a serious competitor to E3D but somehow E3D is a big deal and you NEVER hear of micron??
wow this digs up some good and bad memories...
Yes, I got one of their all metal single extruder blocks a long time ago (circa 2013) originally bought to deal with a repetitive jamming issue with my m2 machine as shipped (ultimately caused by temperature fluctuations)....
beautiful peace of engineering... not worth he expense....looks nice...also needed modification to mount right to the stepper.
The micron all metal extruder block Had a lot of issues with it any filament that was the least bit flexible. I used it with e3d hotend, and with a Pico hot end - (part of the kickstarter) .... long story short, it is not better then the printed hot end mount, perhaps a bit easier to set the tension. it did wok fine with ABS and PLA for me.
I was one of the early users of the micron all metal extruder block so they might have changed it some, but it looks identical to what they sell now..
I tried this block while trying to solve jamming issues on the stock m2, i also tried all metal hot ends on it as one of the suggestions on the jamming was the hotend was bad or there was a issue with the thermistor, tried new thermistors along with a myriad of pid and auto pid tunings .... I even upgraded to the latest marlin at the time and made it work with the reprap discount lcd panel and was testing that .. hoping newer firmware would possibly help the issues. I finally stepped away from the makergear m2 completely for a while after dealing with it on and off for over a year...giving up getting help from mg after much back and forth over a years time...I just stuck the m2 on a shelf.....the issue ultimately turned out to be a bad electronics (Rambo board or Power supply) from day one ... a sad series of events that cost me time and money to get to a point of a usable machine,..... Thankfully I had other printers that did the job I needed.
.... when I went back to the m2 a few mo. back as a platform to try out smoothiewrear / smoothieboard, I also upgraded to a v3b and 24v (mostly just to play and potently to just to sell it off the m2) .. so the micron extruder came off .... also tossed the Rambo board, along with code changes I did have the reprap discount lcd board running on the Rambo (though that's easy to do its all documented in the code and most reprap lcd boards now ship with the Rambo adapter) ... Surprise to me when the m2 worked once I replaced the Rambo board and PS ... so i've kept the m2 and been using it pretty hard recnetly even did some testing of auto tramming sensors and a few other things, some experiments posted here. I've since upgraded the z stepper which was the older 'bad' hi resistance model that maker gear used at the time, and also replaced the extruder stepper which is another component that dies young on the earlier m2's due to a flaw it had with a soft metal pinion gear..... bitter sweet ... an extra 850+ out of pocket in trying things and getting it to a point were it works as it should have when I bought it...
So, if someone really still wants one of the micron all metal extruder block, let me know i'll make you a good deal on it
they retail for like 135 ... its part of some bitter history that just reminds me of what transpired... plus I have no plans on using that block again.
it has been machined by me to fit the gearbox correctly, as it needed to be reversed from the side machined for the geared box to not have any issues hitting the frame. I'll include a hotend mount plate if I can find it, that was custom machined also, but could easily be re-fabricated from a standard mount plate..
there used to be pictures posted of it back in the day of it, with the e3d mounted, but who knows what happened to those.
if there's any interest, I could probably dig up a pic or two of it mounted or re mount it just to give you an idea on how to do it yourself if you have the desire.
mount was very simple and I was able to mount it to the existing m2 mount points. machining was pretty straight forward also....
i'm happy to answer any questions on it, or run any quick tests and give you the results...
Oh, micron used to also sell a replacement filament (hobbled) gear - not sure the right term maker gear uses. that was actually very good, a lot sharper then the original as grips the filament better with less bite required, I still use it. ... (see jules excellent write-up on the correct bite
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2694 ) I can highly recommend that if they still sell it.
with all this said.... if I were to try adding dual extruders going on an m2,and not use maker gears soltion id likely opt for something like this
http://www.geeetech.com/mk8-dual-extruder-p-921.html and just totally do away with the geared extruder...its a failure point you don't need.
this is probably more then anyone ever wanted to know ... shouldn't have coffee this late at night