Jason J. Gullickson

Jason J. Gullickson

QU-BD Extruder Adventures

Awhile back I picked up a pair of QU-BD extruders as part of their Kickstarter campaign .  I purchased these after destroying my Makergear hot- end (twice!) on my RepRap Prusa .  After half a year of wresting with the machine, the plan was to “buy my way out” of extruder problems and get on with the printing.

Needless to say, things didn’t go as planned.

I won’t go into details here, but suffice to say the QU-BD extruders were not a “bolt on and go” operation for me.  After struggling with them for a few weeks and discussing simular issues with other users on their support forum , I arranged to send my extruders back in exchange for a pair that had been tested and known-good.

I am currently awaiting the arrival of these replacements.  Unfortunately the pair I sent in checked-out as working by QU-BD staff so there’s probably no chance of the new ones performing any differently unless I make some changes; that’s what this series of blog posts will be about.

I’m in the process of assembling a list of things to try to get these extruders to work with my setup.  I’ve found a number of things to change about the way I was working with them before and a lot of ideas have been gathered in the support forum since the last time I took a stab at it, so there is hope.

I’ll be posting each experiment here under the qu-bd tag in hopes that this information will be useful to other QU-BD users in the future (as well as a way for me to keep track of what works and what does not).