[ Closed ] Filament Extruder - Convert pellets to filament (Page 18 of 58)

elmoret, you show me the funnel in your photo.. not hopper.. this is what i have with hopper v2.. see photos

take my speech with a grain of salt and open the stl and double-check them to put the proper name as english is not my primary language.. perhaps i make a mistake in my translation...

My kit arrived! What a nice birthday present, good timing. Unfortunately I won't be able to put it together until this weekend, but when I get just a little free time I'll be joining the cool kid self-filament-making club and get to the experimentation.

Looks nice, I bet the square design prints faster than the round one as well.  Then we can make "funnel extender" square piece to connect on top of this, which can be printed multiple times and clipped on top of each other.  This will allow people to extend their filament production by 3-4 hour chunks.

You're approaching the crosssectional area where the pellets will not feed due to gravity - they will clump up and block sooner than you think. It's probably fine, but just a heads up.

Cool idea!

well i picked up my pellets and they were delivered today i was confused as hell when the collor red came as small packs and realised i had to mix the colors myself

What crossectional area is that?  Too tall, to wide, to big a difference between the wide part and narrow part?  I'm working on a masterbatch doser which should be able to dispense a pellet at a time.  Preventing jamming and clumping will be important for that.

do the washers belong on each side of the thrust bearing

thx

What is the speed at which your 3d printer extrudes plastic while printing?  I know that your filastruder outputs 20"/ min. Could this concept be directly integrated into a hotend that replaces the one on the solidoodle?

I know it is more complicated but sounds feasible... thoughts?

The peak speed of the Solidoodle extruder is around 0.5"/second, of 1.75mm filament. Thats in the same ballpark as the Filastruder.

Couple of issues:
- You can't put a pellet extruder on the printhead. It's way too heavy, even if I redesigned it with weight in mind.
- Pellet extruders can't retract. So, even if you put it next to your printer with a Bowden tube feeding the hot end, you could never retract, or reliably control extrusion speed
- If you leave the extruder stepper, and just feed it from the Filastruder, than might work - but it would be difficult to match the feed rates so that there wasn't a surplus or shortage of filament.

Ok, I'm with Ben.  Just arrived here and just finished reading 18 pages.  Please put me down for one in the next batch, and when do you think that might be?  (Not expecting soon, sure you need feedback from the last batch first.)  Off to read the instructions now.