[ Closed ] Filament Extruder - Convert pellets to filament (Page 11 of 58)

How perfect does the filament need to be to work in the SD2?  If I have some minimal waving in the middle of my new filament, do I need to worry about it not feeding into the SD hotend correctly?

I plan to do my first test prints with some natural abs today/tomorrow.

I also have a 4 lbs. of snow white pellets that I would like to try out.  Should I run my filastruder til empty and then load in the snow white or just load it into the hopper when the natural gets low?

What is the price on the retrofit kit?  20" a minute sounds pretty good.  The less I have to hear that motor run the better.

emailed you...

$15 shipped. I've been putting a folded towel over the motor/bearing area, all the way up to the hopper. It cuts about 5dB off the noise, by my measurements.

On that note, I packed the gearbox with grease, no quieter.

Drill method it is going to be then.

What spool did you end up printing and what was your method for attaching it to the drill?

For everybody who is looking into colorants for the machine:

I messed around with more HDPE colorant + ABS all weekend and I still cant find a combination that works for consistent color.  I have a theory that it might work but would require starting with something that looks more like powder instead of pellets.  I think the HDPE is cooking against the inside of the machine before it has a chance to mix with the ABS.  If it were in a powder form and you could more consistently mix it before it went into the machine it might work. 

ABS colorant has worked perfectly at 50:1

This is all I have on me at the moment. I have grey and black abs colorant that I still need to run.

The blue in the picture is HDPE colorant.  The picture doesn't represent the green very well.

I guess ideally I would want to grind the ABS as well.  Coffee grinder would probably work...

elmoret how well do you think the filastruder would handle powered ABS?

Not as well as pellets. The auger to wall clearance is much less than the diameter of pellets, but greater than powder. I'd guess it works but your output rate drops. Hard to say for sure though!

This is what it looks like now mixed pre extrusion.

I was wondering if it would be possible to get a homogeneous enough mixture given the high ratio, size of pellets, and small batch size.  A blade grinder might chop the pellets enough without getting a powder, a burr grinder might be too effective.   

Full pellets may be more of a problem if you want to mix colors.  There would be so few of each pellet that they may be spaced too far apart to really mix.  Too fine of a powder would cause problems with changing color, because the powder could be hard to flush.   Some sort of sifting after grinding could insure that nothing goes in the hopper that is smaller than the clearance around the auger.

There could be something like a color hopper upstream, setup like a coin operated candy dispenser that could drop a pellet with a turn of a gear.  You would need to figure out how much plastic is conveyed with a turn of the auger so you know how to work out the ratio.

The desktop factory people might like that.  They included coloring in the requirements, but you can do that by premixing the pellets.  The addition of a masterbatch dispenser might give it a leg up.