Recently I purchased a second hand Artillery Sidewinder X1 3D Printer with extruder problems. The stepper would frequently lose steps regardless of the pinch roller tightness, causing prints to fail. To combat this I made the decision to upgrade the extruder’s 23mm pancake motor.
The pancake NEMA17 stepper was first swapped for the 38mm x-axis motor, which was itself replaced by a larger 48mm motor to compensate for the increased weight of the extruder assembly.
Because the stepper drivers operate at a constant current, increasing motor size should proportionally increase torque at low RPM. At higher speeds the higher inductance of the larger motors would result in increased back EMF and reduce the torque, however for the relatively low speed of the extruder and x-axis, this is not a major concern.
To achieve this several modifications were needed:
- The x-axis cable was extended to reach the further-away motor connector.
- The extruder heater block and extruder cooling fan cables were extended to reach the extruder PCB connectors.
- A new mount for the PCB was printed due to the lack of standoff mounting points that were present on the original motor. Due to the oversized nature of the new motor, heat softening of the PLA part was not a concern, however for prolonged high flow rates or if the printer were enclosed, higher temperature plastics such as ABS or PETG would be preferable.
After having completed the upgrade, disassembling of the original extruder motor revealed that the rear bearing was heavily worn, and was likely responsible for the poor performance. Being a standard 625ZZ ball bearing, it was easily replaced to return the motor to full functionality.
