Powder extruder

I see some abandoned plans for a granule extruder for RepRap on the wiki. If you were to have a cheap source of thermoplastic powder (<1um granules), how hard would it be to make a toolhead for that?

I suppose the short answer is 'hard enough that it isn't well known or documented, as opposed to being so easy that it's commonplace'.

I think the trick is that a proper auger is not easily salvaged or adapted from something else to drive the pellets into the hot zone. Everyone gets stuck when it looks like you need to go and machine something specifically to do all of this.

I'm sure there are some wiser folks on here who have some thoughts about this.

...And where it has been done, it's on larger machines with larger carriages or fixed extruders. I think i remember le BigRep had one at some point.

If you have an abundant source of fine plastic powder, perhaps you should look into making some sort of powder bed printer instead?

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www.Fablicator.com

Hello community!

There are always some projects going on with the devolopment of a granule extruder, beceasue of chaos properties of open source development, I will post this to notify you about the most recent (first quarter 2012) projects regarding granule extruders, including mine

I would like to notify you about my project, which is partially bases on research such as this forum topic and other simultanious projects:

My PROJECT PAGE
My FORUM TOPIC to give feedback after examining the project page obove

similar simultaniuos projects:
Marcus grinder/shredder+filament maker project
extruder printer head Project page
extruder printer head Topic page
Filabot project
you can also see my project page to see all the links and projects I've found on my research. It can save you time to follow my notes.

Greetings Ward