An opportunity to have a peek inside the extruder and hot-end of the M200 Plus presented itself yesterday, since it had started skipping now and then, when loading filament and while printing the first raft layer.
Thank you for this clarification on the hotend of the M200 PLUS.
Zortrax never gave information on the differences between the two extruders.
But it is unfortunate that Zortrax has not further modified its extruder because it is not very effective for filaments too hard or not having a regular diameter. Many other extruders from other manufacturers have an adjustable spring mechanism that continuously drives the filament and drives it much more efficiently.
I don't want to sound like an apologist for things Zortrax gets criticism for, but consider the following:
An opportunity to have a peek inside the extruder and hot-end of the M200 Plus presented itself yesterday, since it had started skipping now and then, when loading filament and while printing the first raft layer.
My printer has so far only ever printed Z-ULTRAT and Z-ABS. Z-SEMIFLEX has arrived but not yet been used.
I had same concerns a few years ago with my M200 but overall Zortrax engineers know what they do, If you increase force of the motor then it will not skip any steps but extruder gear will scratch filament if you have distance inconsistency between platform and nozzle and in real life if you want to build machine which has perfectly flat axes and platform then I don't know if 20k USD is enough only for this parts. Because Zortrax printing with the raft then first 2-3 layers do not need to be smooth and beauty they are only for filling the gaps to prepare even surface for next layers.
Overall skipping is not an engineering/production mistake but a feature which in case if a pressure in the nozzle is too high then it will skip few times and recover at the moment when pressure back to normal. Thanks to this you don't need to disassemble extruder to clean scratched material by the extruder gear which is very common failure in other printers on the market.
Yes agree, and thanks for the reassuring. I was looking for an excuse to open the printer anyway :) . Still i must admit that i don't like this skipping even when it is harmless.
3 examples to show that the Zortrax extruder is not very efficient :
I recently tried 3 nylon filaments (NYLON ULTRA of VOLUMIC, NYLON TECHLINE of TAG3D and STYX-12 of FORM FUTURA) : impossible to load them in the Zortrax : the pinion of the extruder skated and the filament was not pushed into the nozzle. The 3 filaments work very well in a Witbox printer equipped with the DDG extruder (see photo below) and a heated bed !
We find this kind of extruder in many printers now.
Why Zortrax can not build an efficient extruder ?
3 examples to show that the Zortrax extruder is not very efficient :
I recently tried 3 nylon filaments (NYLON ULTRA of VOLUMIC, NYLON TECHLINE of TAG3D and STYX-12 of FORM FUTURA) : impossible to load them in the Zortrax : the pinion of the extruder skated and the filament was not pushed into the nozzle.
The 3 filaments work very well in a Witbox printer equipped with the DDG extruder (see photo below) and a heated bed !
We find this kind of extruder in many printers now.
Why Zortrax can not build an efficient extruder ?
But you writing about M200 extruder and not M200 Plus about which is topic here. Zortrax already built efficient extruder which is used in M200 Plus. It is right what you wrote but only valid for M200, not Plus version
"But you writing about M200 extruder and not M200 Plus about which is topic here. Zortrax already built efficient extruder which is used in M200 Plus. It is right what you wrote but only valid for M200, not Plus version"
Exactly: That's why I'm trying to get a lot of information on this new extruder, to try to understand if it can be effective with more filaments !