Tommelise Ambient AEM Extruder 1.0
Page Contents
Overview
The Tommelise AEM (Ambient Extrusion Modelling) Extruder 1.0 is the heart of the whole Tommelise technology. Tommelise uses an extension of the Mk 2 FDM extruder invented in late 2005 by Dr. Adrian Bowyer ...
...of the RepRap project. The Mk 2 FDM extruder represents a major breakthrough in FDM technology in that it can print 3D objects out of molten plastic in a room temperature environment. This means that the positioning system for the printer, not having to resist temperatures of several hundred degrees, can be made much more cheaply. This brings the price of an FDM printer down from tens of thousands of dollars to a few hundred.
The truly amazing part of all of this is that Dr. Bowyer has put the Mk 2 in the public domain so that anyone can make and/or sell as many as they please. The Mk 2 could have easily been patented and used as the basis for a new company. That Dr. Bowyer didn't do just that is an incredible piece of philanthropy on his part.
That said, the Mk 2 is rather tricky to build and even trickier to build without a machine shop. Vik Olivier of the RepRap project made some progress in improving that situation, expecially in the production of an extruder barrel without a formal lathe.
I've gone a little further with that simplification process with an easy-to-make extruder barrel made of braised, hard copper tube instead of a brass bolt (Vik) or brass round stock (Adrian). I've also redesigned the Mk 2's polymer pump to be easier to make and to handle engineering plastics such as HDPE, HPP and ABS as well as the polycapralactone plastic that the Mk 2 was originally designed for.
This piece of documentation is intended to let people like yourself see how I built the parts that I did and how they work. It is a work in progress and eventually should be much longer and more detailed. To that end, I would appreciate it greatly if you would be kind enough to comment on the content I've produced so far and suggest places where it needs expansion or clarification. To that end I've started a new forum topic on the forums page of this website entitled Tommelise AEM Extruder: documentation discussion. I hope to be hearing from you all there.