Been a while.......

Been a couple years since been in here but now back melting some plastic..

So today bought an auger some brass pipe other parts on the way so any one else built filament extruder?
Anything I need to look out for ? Tips and tricks? Any comments appreciated

Yes, I made one .

Lot of issues to look out for:
- use a lot of back pressure to remove air from the melt
- as stable melt temperature as possible. Any deviation here creates filament diameter differences.
- use a winder
- use a strong high torque motor and cooling for it.
- filter the molten filament

It did cost me quite a while to get nice filament out of the system but still not finished with it. I need to find way to remove the last occasional air bubble in the filament. Just ordered the parts for a automatic filament measure and control system so I don't have to monitor and adjust the filament diameter manually.

Good luck with your build.

cheers for the reply any chance of some pics of your setup
just laying out parts at moment to work out brackets etc to hold together waiting on some electronics

what plastic you running?

I am running at the moment Chi Mei  polylac Pa-758 This has a MFI 3 at 5kg 200deg C . This mfi gives me about 1kg/10hours. This is a clear ABS plastic. I started with this, because you can see any junk and air bubbles in them.
Plan to try other abs types, nylon and maybe even PC in the future,

To control the filament diameter better I also designed this thing: [www.thingiverse.com]

Will post some pic later.

Parts are slowly arriving........

Few more to come then will try some get some pics up

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/23/2016 11:47PM by Meltedplastic.

Here some pics of my setup.



Standard wiper motor driver the drill.
The granules hopper is way oversized.



The extruder is a bit of stainless 1/2inch tube and a heater.
Internally there is a filter and a breaker plate to help increase the pressure in the extruder head
Some grinded granules do fall out of the air holes drilled in the pipe.



The filament is sized with the filament puller (see my previous post)



Then it is would up on a friction driven spool.



The result. Some almost perfect but very usable filament.

Nice work! Have been really keen to try making one of these to shred junk plastic, rather than paying for pure filament. Can you shred other types of junk plastics, like HDPE milk jugs or plastic bags? Not too concerned with the colour, even if it's PakNSave yellow

Never tried anything other than abs granules. The granules are only about $9/kg.

Likely you need a lot of bags or bottles to make up a kg of plastic.
If you like to shred things, why not use the plastic from a fridge or washing machine? Much more bulk in them.
Also you can buy recycled abs granules.

But whatever source of recycled plastic your choose, it has to be clean. If there is any junk in it, you will block the 3d printer nozzle.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/28/2016 02:58AM by wingmaster.

More info about the extruder on my blog http://3dwingmaster.blogspot.co.nz/

Recycled ABS is a great idea. Where do you get your pellets from?

I only used virgin granules, never recycled ones. But I came across the following sites in nz while searching for granules:
In the last one of these sites listed specific abs granules, but don't see it listed any more.

[astronplastics.com.au]
[www.budgetplastics.co.nz]


[www.plastics.org.nz]