Educate me please about using HDPE for 3D printing

Hey all,

[admin pls move if posted incorrectly. THX]

The wiki claims that HDPE filaments are fickle won't stick to any standard build surface and can be otherwise hard to work with. I have also viewed posts on this forum of HDPE viability being "in the works" by a new upstart [also developing Polypropylene products and techniques].

The reason for this post is that in my day work we regularly produce pounds upon pounds of virgin/uniform HDPE [*King Starboard] chips in CNC machining of parts from sheet goods. They don't exactly fly up the dust collection hose, and always leave random piles that need cleaned up before the next cut program can happen. For instance today, in partial processing of a full 3/4" sheet of material I have over 12 pounds of clean uniform chips to dispose of.



Given my side investment with 3d printing and the like, throwing away this kind of "free" inventory seems completely senseless. And aside from trying to give it all back to the manu for reclaiming, I hope to find better ways to reuse this stuff in a DIY form with your assistance.


Injection Molding is the most viable option to date, but we are not set up for that yet. Using an FDM printer filament made from this stuff still appears to be better for our immediate capabilities yet there is still a lot of work to be done from what I can tell.


Would love any thoughts and lessons that this great group of folks have to offer on the matter.

THX,

MC

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{[www.bearcnc.com]} {[www.facebook.com]}

Ok so no thoughts or comments....

How about this? Who out there is able to turn these chips into spools of filament for a fee?

I have over 40 pounds of the stuff so far from milling one sheet. Need to do something with it.

MC

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{[www.bearcnc.com]} {[www.facebook.com]}

seem it not the most fila friendly for users HDPE and judging by the short entry aint a lot of love for it
before that the chips gonna have to go through a filastruder or something , which then leads to the size of the chip not advisable to loading anything larger then 5 mm, so a grinder my be required grinder,,, need to search around more but it seems a lot of work for a poor preforming filament.

The state of these forums can be a bit discouraging. I've not weighed in on it because I don't have any experience with HDPE.

If there is a lack of information, the best advice I can give you is look into making a filament extruder and do some experiementing and share it here with the community, if the materials are cost free why not?