Acrylic Glass (PMMA: Poly(methyl methacrylate)) as a building material

Is it feasible to use PMMA as a building material? Has anyone attempted it?

Would it be too difficult to make into a filament (I think this is also called extruding) to feed the extruder?
Or does it have some other bad qualities that make it bad for RepRapping (such as bad coherence, too slow or fast cooling, or creeping, after deposition)?
Or is it simply more efficient to laser cut, and so additive fabrication is of less interest?

Or is it just that no one has gotten around to trying it yet?

The use of varied building materials is one of the cooler things about the RepRap (and most other 3d printing tech, but RepRap seems to have a special amount of attention to this, with the exchangable head design [which really should be an exchangeable head design with a multihead which can rotate and switch between a few of the many heads WHILE fabricating, as well as multiples of these multiheads; not sure about how the added weight would affect design, though]).

It is rather cheap material and easy to acquire, which makes it interesting. At least in Holland in the hardware stores you can buy it in sheets as hobby plastic (no HDPE, ABS or polymorph). I can also imagine that you can cut 3mm bars of this material from a sheet of PMMA. You wouldn't need specially extruded source material if you had an extruder that can handle non-round filament.

---

Regards,

Erik de Bruijn
[Ultimaker.com] - [blog.erikdebruijn.nl]

Hi Joshua,

here: [forums.reprap.org] in the last posts - polymerisation of MMA ...

PMMA is a brittle material and with remelting you reduce the maximum strength and create some additional stress in the material, so it's possible that the fabbed objects would develop stress-cracks over time.

Viktor

Yes PMMA works well but it needs a heated bed to make it stick to the base and itself. [hydraraptor.blogspot.com]

You can buy it in 3mm rods 1m long, which is a bit limiting on the size of the object you can build. 3mm filament is too brittle to coil up but 2mm is OK.

---

[www.hydraraptor.blogspot.com]