[ Closed ] Filament Extruder - Convert pellets to filament (Page 26 of 58)

The beauty of the Lyman design is the off the shelf parts that you don't need a mortgage to pay for I could easily throw a 4th axis on my mill and make proper profile extrusion screws but at what cost? once you do that you also have to have a precision barrel for it to get the most out of it and work properly and more station heaters etc..$$$ The main problem I see is there are plenty of maker type people willing to spend a couple hundred bucks for a tool even if it's slow but once you jump to a couple thousand the number of people willing or able to spend the money on home grade equipment shrinks rapidly. With that said, ideas are always welcome and usually spur more ideas from differing views and sometime all it takes is one person thinking out loud to come up with a breakthrough in designing a really cheap product that works!!!

And that place doesn't seem to make the augers for plastic extrusion all I saw were regular flighted augers...

I've been using 100 watt band heaters so far. I thought about using the cartridge heaters- couple issues:

1.) You'd then need a 125watt 12v power supply. Good quality supplies (like Meanwell, etc) for this run ~$30 used.
2.) You'd then need either an Arduino, or still need the same PID controller for the control of the heater. You'd need to switch 10 amps instead of 0.9.
3.) You'd need an aluminum or similar block to mount the cartridge heaters in.
4.) It won't heat faster, unless you go up in wattage. If heating faster is what you guys want, there are more powerful band heaters - but you still have to wait for the plastic at the center of the pip to heat up, without cooking the plastic at the outside of the pipe. That limits the heat flux you can push.

Excited to hear how the puller/spooler work out!

Great work!  It's hard to hold my breath for the release!

Extruding now! Black for a bit, then clear:

Are you extruding through a bolt threaded into the nozzle?  It looks like there's something on the end there, and I can't make out what it is.

What happens when you mix the clear and black? can you get a consistent blend of colour with a random mix in the hopper?

Masterbatch is proving hard to get.  Makibox has a variety of pellet colors though, and I was thinking of getting the closest thing to red yellow and blue that they offer, to try mixing.  Since they aren't concentrated like masterbatch, you don't have the problem of mixing the pellets at 50:1 and hoping the distribution is consistent in such small batches.

I'm skeptical about that.  They list the same lead times for filament, which they say they extrude themselves.  I don't know if ordering filament from them means they will get their Ramen extruder done, or if they have access to a pro one and a pelletizer.   Or they will wait for someone to place an order with them, at which point they will order from an extruder who has to schedule their job.  However it's done, they are the only ones offering pellets in colors other than brown black and clear.  Also no one else has PLA pellets of any kind, including the Desktop Factory people who had promised to supply them.

See page 15:

http://www.soliforum.com/topic/557/fila … t/page/15/

Not sure how I'm supposed to measure the temperatures you requested, the filament is moving ~ 1cm/sec! IR thermometer would not be even close to accurate, thermocouple can't be held onto something moving that fast.

There's less chance of ramen at lower temps - try 170C or so.

That answers my question about flushing out black. Wow. Is it even flushed yet?