How NOT to build a Filament Extruder
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 พ.ค. 2024
- Quick bonus video this week! A look at my DIY filament extruder and why I never used it. Spoiler: It wasn't very good, but maybe you can take some of my learnings and use them to build a better one 😉
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![Filament Extruder from widely available parts [ENG SUBS]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/NrexroHEQAc/mqdefault.jpg)
“If I build this project today a build it diftently” please do it it’s so interesting 😁
Yup, maybe for doing pellets from recycled plastic
Please :)
Was thinking this for the whole video! 😂
Yes!
Was thinking the same thing, would love to see the design process :)
So, you already have a lot of pellets laying around, why don't you build the extruder again and make a video about it. Filament + Content = W 🤣
12:08 "We only had enough budget to see the thing barely work." I think this describes a good chunk of industrial design.
I loved learning about this build! Thanks for sharing the process and your learnings along the way. What a great way to document this project before you say goodbye to it.
I really love "failure" videos like this one. As a viewer it gives me a chance to learn a lot about the thought process that went into the thing, and in this case a reality check on the difficulty involved in building something that looks simple on the surface. I'm sure they're not as satisfying to make, but please take this as encouragement to make more in the future when the opportunity presents!
You can learn a lot more from failure stories than success stories, anyone trying to build a successful device should find out about everyone who has failed before them, then you can avoid reinventing that particular wheel.
Thanks for showing it :)
I’m sure this was a fun project to work on and to gain experience. It’s nice to see the overall progress on a project and the conclusions out of it.
Building without money and knowledge, is actually what the entire maker-space is about.
... Leveling up yourself.
Yes. :))) This is the way I feel when I review my previous projects. Stupidity, ambitiousness and spend the money which I didn't have at that point :)
I especially love the videos of yours that start with "How NOT to..."
These are the holy grail for 3d printing. If someone can get one of these to the point where they are affordable and about as easy to use as, say, an Ender 3 we could see a major shift in the biggest problem in 3d printing... waste. Being able to recycle your waste into usable filament.... dream.
We really need to see more development in this area.
Ditto, would love to see a series on trying to build one now that more is known about them. It's the last thing left to make 3d printing affordable IMO as 6 to 8 spools of decent filament and you're likely at the cost of a DIY extruder. The commercial offerings seem to be stuck in about 2014 as well, the most popular ones are all talking about ABS, which many of us totally stopped using once PET-G became widely available.
You can just buy these extruders.
There is a big issue with this. Plastics degrade every time they're reheated and polymer engineering is not a trivial subject.
regrind isn't as good as raw pellet, and would require an even more complicated setup, and a powerful grinder
@@natalieisagirlnow I understand the complexity involved.
The knowledge gained was priceless. Clever to monetize it, in this video, before tossing it. At the same time, your free sharing of this training is helpful for the next engineer so you have earned it. Well done!
budget should not be an issue anymore, would it?
i say: build it! ;P
"This is a video I didn't plan to make it, but you guys ask for it, so here we goes" moments later "the only reason I keep this here is because I wanted to make a video at some point and after this video, byebye" hahaha
I love it when people have the honesty to show their failures in videos. Not only does it break with this annoying social media convention of coming across as perfect, either making people distrust everything they see or making them feel bad because they believe they are so much worse at everything than the people whose videos they watch; imo it also is way more helpful for people who actually want to build a similar things. Explaining what didn't work or what went wrong is at least as important as seeing what did work for someone. It's also for people like me, pure hobbyists with no engineering background, super helpful in developing engineering skills; to see what kind of thinking went into your design process and what kind of mistakes you made when you were less professional than now spares us so much trial and error to do ourselves.
Would love to see another attempt at this. Clearly you've learned a lot since you first made it.
just as im about to make my own diy extruder...thanks tom
Stepping through your problem solving process is brilliant and inspirational. Esp in 2013 and a $0 budget!
WOW, I can't believe since few days I am working on designing my own extruder, and then this video is uploaded, what a coincidence, it's surely gonna help a lot!!!
Man, a useble home made filament extruder is everything that the DIY community wanted. Low cost materials, decent filaments e a huge step into recycling plastic!
Hai Tom, Been There Done That...
Some considerations:
* Big augur size best for recycling 3Dprints with schredder
* I use recycled filament for very big 3Dprints to cut costs
* A cheap DIY 3Dprint worm transmission with nema23 stepper works
* Tube heater wire is to long to the hopper hence the clogging
* Reduce temperature of the tube near the hopper with a large heatsink
* Analoque Hall sensors works cheap and simple
* Threaded rod and nuts through brackets on top of each module for a more robust construction
Hope this helps finishing the project ;)
You totally have to try this again now Thomas! This wold make an awesome build series and I for one would love to see that!
I so need my own filament extruder one day so I'm very grateful that you are researching this area.
This was awesome! What an ambitious project, would love to see more on this.
So many of these problems I had when I started making a filament extruder. I just redesigned it from scratch after my first one broke down, wished I saw this before I started that project
Both interesting and inspiring. Definitely the stuff that makers are made of.
More of this, i'm interested in learning more about this process and its good learning regardless.
You're the perfect example that you don't need all the money in the world to create something. Even though it didn't really work out it's still an interesting project. Great Video as always keep it up.
This was super interesting, this kind of design breakdown is something you do really well, please consider doing more open source design on your channel
Recycling your waste filament could also be a motivation, not only the price of the filament itself. It just makes me sad to throw away so much plastic from failed prints.
yes it's so hard to find filament recyclers who will take my failed print PLA even if I pay for shipping and expect nothing back.
the trick is to have a reliable printer so you don't have bad prints
@@natalieisagirlnow And then your designs fail because that's how designing things works :P
@@miranda.cooper sounds like someone who exclusively print completed designs or some genius who got a perfect design without running partial prototypes.
@@natalieisagirlnow My printer is reliable, but some prints are just for temporal use, support stucture, test prints or simply one-time use,...
Thanks for sharing your learnings!
I've been toying in my mind with the idea of making a filament extruder, so I'd loooove to see you making one
Love seeing the thought process and logic behind it. Most people would probably say why bother, but sometimes the whole point of doing something is doing something. That being said, with the price of filament where it is, I'm not really sure how practical something like this is for the average hobbyist. I wonder what the sales figures look like for the filastruder or other available filament extruders. You'd have to be someone who prints A LOT to make the cost and headache worth it.
IKR, you are watching a maker channel... and you asked the host why are you building things.... lol.
@@MegaMaking ha yeah, I do some maker stuff on my channel and get those comments sometimes like, "why build it, I can go buy one for $30" but the whole point is the actual build itself and what you learn from it. I posted my comment while watching the video and it seems that Tom shares the same sentiment at the end of the video though. I'm sure he learned a lot from the build but the practicality of these machines is low with filament prices being low and the convenience factor of pressing a button and having 20 spools show up at your door in 2 days. Fun technical project though.
I could very much live with this turning into a project build channel 😉
Now a lot of people would like to see you build it again :D
loved the video. im the person in charge of producing filament at work and i love it. this sure makes me appreciate my big extruder. btw at normal speed i produce 1kg/7minutes. at 0.02mm tolerance.
i love this idea of making your own filament :D
Enjoyed the video, part of doing something like that had to be frustrating yet satisfying because you designed it, built it, and used to make something else. How cool is that!
There's one more thing to the "If I built it now" aspect: Technology has advanced by (as I write this) almost nine years. The geared stepper motor and driver with decent torque is now cheap enough to almost fit within the 2013 budget, sleeve heaters and PID controllers too, and you can actually buy proper augers with compress and mix zones. Would be interesting to see the 2022 version. . .
Boy this is gonna be great.
@@bigfilsing you okay?
I haven't seen the old video on this and I'm just watching this one but yes! Yes yes! This!! On ur previous video you teased that you might make this video and I'm really happy it came through 😁
Very interesting, thanks for the post-mortem! Interesting that you were able to get usable filament out of it: other diy extruders I've heard of that used drill bits had metal crud in the filament.
I think the other use case for a home extruder that people really want is for recycling support material and failed prints.
Thanks for sharing!!! i always say you learn more from your failures
If nothing else, it's a great example of progress. A great look at how far 3D printing has evolved in a few years.
This was really interesting to see, thank you Tom!? 💜🧡💙
I would love to see you building this today.
Thanks for the video, very cool build!
Congrats on taking the plunge to build a Voron. Looking forward to the upcoming streams.
this is a more impressive project than most engineering grads would be able to pull off!
I’d love to see Tom go after it again with an affordable budget. He said that these type of machines wouldn’t be useful, but imagine how good it would be for a MakerSpace with a lot of printer enthusiasts. I think Tom could pull it off “cheap” with his creativity
Have a look at my channel; it is possible at a budget less than 700usd. The results are looking good; I made some nice filament already (still need to upload that video)
Oh yes, experimenting with these kinds of setups... I'm wondering how Thomas from now will build something like this again...
preciousplastic has some interesting tool projects to extrude recycled plastics of various types. Not really a filament extruder but that could also work.
Super interesting to see the things you tried with this project, thanks for the video!
yaaay! you listened!
nice. thanks for sharing the details. i always wanted to build a filament extruder myself... but it became more and more impractical as I dived deeper into the designs and the cost of producing your own filaments compared to purchasing ready-made.
A couple things. I love that hoodie. Where did you get it?
I've been looking at the EXO Extruder which doesn't use a water bath but 4 cooling fans. What are your thoughts on that type of system?
Cool video! I like this kind of project summary and lessons learned. :)
Great project. I would love to see a working v2.
I can already tell you're gonna build this again xD
I think this is a fantastic end results of an engineering student. I look at the solutions and can see why you made those choices. I spend nine months to find a solution to extruding Zip Loc sandwich bag basically with zero back ground and less then a year out of college. All the plastic neck down occurs between the nozzle and the chilling means. My distance was near a half a foot. Yours is a few inches and not that obvious. The Zipper was cooled by a stream of water and the film by a drum.
I agree that the drive approach was not good. I would consider using your lathe as the means of driving the screw because it should have a much bigger motor then the two you used and a speed setting system to get close to the speed range. You can make two steady rests to hold up the extrusion tube that later can be use for guiding rotating cylinders when cutting long shafts. Lathe motors should produce a uniform speed. To simplify the control assume that the speed, temperature zones and opening size from the hopper determines the extrusion rate. These do not change. They are gross setting to get smooth surface of plastic related to the temperature at the nozzle tip. The size in adjusted by the speed of the puller which has a short time constant. The delay is the length from where the hot plastic freezes to the diameter measuring rollers at the pulling speed. All the cross section reduction occurs between the nozzle and the freeze location. This looks like a length of a few inches.
Thanks you Thomas!
Thanks for the video!
how did you build the heating element? im making one of these on my own and for me that has been the most challenging part of the whole build
LOVE YOUR VIDS
It would be very nice to see a capable filament extruder build. I've been wanting to do one myself for a bit, I have two Ender 3s and plenty of scrap pla. I've been playing and learning arduino coding with an uno so looking forward to possible follow along. Thanks for the great videos.
Agree, with the price of filament it will probably not be a financial wonder, but as other also points out there is the waste aspect, not having to buy new filament and throw out prototypes would be great.
Of course turning failed parts/prototypes into will require additional steps to break up the parts or maybe even a pellet extruder to make the material more uniform before going into the filament extruder. But... we have to start somewhere - and no matter the result, watching you designing and building a new "less budget" version (still mainly using commonly available parts) would be both interesting and educational..
I love your content
@MadeWithLayers I'm actually quite interested in the filament sensor you used with your extruder. I've seen the Infidel, but I actually need something to measure the filament diameter coming out of a Filabot and as you said, I don't want to put too much pressure on recently extruded filament. Do you still have any info, models, etc. on that particular sensor? I get the basic concept and can probably create something from scratch, but anything to start with would be helpful.
Yeah it would be awesome to see you build one that you're happy with
+1 for those who want you to try again, and do it right. Recycling printing waste (supports, wipe towers, failed prints, unneeded prototypes, etc.) is something that needs to be a lot more accessible than it is now. What we REALLY need is a Prusa-like kit so that high quality, but affordable machines, can get quickly into the public space. Most kits are woefully underpowered (Filastruder) or insanely overpriced (anything ready to run). The Lymans and Recyclebot designs are great, but building an extruder from a BOM and some wiring diagrams does not accessible make. I've been waiting to see Stefan's progress with his shredder and extruder for too long. :(
Very instructive, as always, Tom. :)
What you say near 8:40-8:45 is interesting, about things being "a bit tricky for a third semester engineering student". ;) I remember my "old" first student years in IT and mechanics (it's 20 years from now), and that kind of challenge would have driven me to go beyond the student course scope (well, OK. I did). It's always very satisfying, whether it's a success or not (learning new things, you know).
It would be interesting to revisit this project!!
Maybe team up with cnc kitchen for it?
Great Video!
Hi, i would be interested how to make the Sidewinder X1 V4 more safe...installing mosfet ect. Thanks.
Tnx for youre experience
Great video Tom. Motters
While filament becomes cheaper and cheaper, we face a different issue now: Our printed parts are rarely recycleable since it lacks any kind of markings which exact plastic it is. So even if the quality is far below the bought stuff, as long as it can somehow handle shredded scraps, a DIY filament extruder could solve many of our issues.
If you still have notes/design files etc you could put them on GitHub, so that others can fork the project to revive and enhance this actually quite promising design, that could result into something really cool. I really like the idea with the water bath to cool the filament down. Maybe adding a water cooling loop to the cold side of the extruder could solve the heatcreep issue. Since stainless steel is a rather bad heat conducter, that could actually work.
As a software engineer I am always intrigued by the idea of getting cheaper hardware do the job by improving the intelligence inside the software. Since the speed of the filament should be known at the side of the pulling motor and the distance to the nozzle is fixed and we get a width value somewhere inbetween, shouldn't we be able to find or learn PID values to flatten the variation? One issue somewhere in the system, might throw it off, but with enough exception handling, it might just work.
Thanks for showing this extruder build. I read that NASA is making printers for their space programs. And its an all in one system, and it reuses all the food containers. And other plastic utensils. Grinds the plastic up, creates new filament for new prints. Such a great idea. That Filabot extruder sure looks nice. But its only 5 to 10 k. Thanks Thomas.
I don't want to make one because of the cost of buying filament. I want to re-use the plastic from some of the products I've purchased instead of putting them into recycling where, to be honest because of others not caring about the environment the whole load gets sent to landfill. I wish I could do something with the glass and metal to but one step at a time.
So I'd love to see anything you have to say on the topic. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. It's greatly appreciated.
tom have you tried the petbot with bottle tape?
Great Video ! Very entertaining, recognizing myself a Bit 😂😂😂
I have some questions about the extrusion screw! You indicate that the optimal size is based on pellet size, and the optimal drive speed is then based on screw size. I'm not sure I understand this... The auger should fit in the barrel with just enough clearance to not risk binding, and I don't see how pellets will affect that. (Unless I'm wrong!) For drive rate, a larger screw would not need to turn as fast for a given amount of extruded filament, but as long as it's slow enough that all the pellets fully melt, it should not matter, right? Or is it more to do with the volume of the melt zone being larger for a higher diameter? (Due to surface area and volume scaling differently.)
Alternatively, any links to relevant papers would be much appreciated! The only ones I can find are meant for industrial setups with very special tapered extrusion screws.
Hey I’m doing the same project and was wondering how you do your heating element. I been looking through and not sure what to purchase for it.
The heater is simply nichrome wire tightly wrapped around the barrel with layers of kapton tape as insulation. Worked reasonably well, but I'd probably go with clamped aluminum blocks and heater cartridges today.
A project perhaps a bit too ambitious for a student with a limited budget and time. That said... I'm a fan of this project. I don't necessarily think you failed. I think you didn't have the resources you needed. Anyway I like that you posted on the project. A good lesson on learning from failures and that's really how we learn sometimes. Keep up the good work and keep posting.
Precious Plastic has an open source plastic recycling designs including a filament extruder and a shredder.
I would love to see you do it again, not Ro make new fillamment but to recycle scrap prints. I print a lot in pla an keep all scrap parts, to recycle them some day.
This looks fun, and I like fun lol
How much torque / speed did you need ?
Looking Sharp 👌 👍
Please Thomas sell the machine on ebay or make a contest, I am sure some viewers will love having the machine even if it is not working at all. thanks
because yes , your relics of 2013 are valuable
So... How much to build this project today (and document it on the channel)? I've got a little bit to chip in to see Tom build a new filament extruder... Can that be a patreon tier?
12:30 the saying I usually go with... Pay once, Cry once
Great video. You SHOULD build it again today with that $500 budget! *_@@_*
I think most people who want a filament extruder are thinking about re-using failed 3D prints. Or just old plastic. That is really really difficult. Perhaps the better thing to try is injection molding with old plastic? You don't need to chop it as carefully, it doesn't need to have exactly the same material attributes, and depending on what you are making the tolerances might be looser.
I know that this video is quite old nowadays, but still very interesting! Thanks for sharing! Though, I'm wondering how did you make the heater system.. did you use some kind of wire to heat up the tube? Can you please clarify?
It looks like he used resistance wire, maybe kanthal wire or something similar, though nowadays you can get band heaters that're the right size for this pretty cheap and they're much more reliable for this purpose
From my point of view, the biggest advantage of a home-based filament extruder is waste, supports, and failed prototypes. Especially with rapid prototypes who cares about the color. I could imagine a workflow where rapid prototypes are continually recycled and are made mostly of recycled filament.
Great diy project. I think ppl in tbe comments ignoring the fact that it was built on a unuversity student budget. Super cool budget engineering.
You need to use parts from Injection Molding machines and plastic injection molds, There are small auger feed parts and simple plunger styles to feed plastic beads. The nozzle, would be made from hardened steel. For the Hot end (Barrel ) there are pyrometer controlled heater bands. What I see in your video is half of a injection molding machine.
I live in the UK in Kent. I dump failed prints in the weekly mixed recycling collection bag. I really wonder if they make use of it???
Best case, they incinerate it.
@@SianaGearz I mean they call it recycling so I hope they dont just burn it!
@@Audio_Simon Yes, "recycling" is an euphemism, almost no plastics can be effectively recycled, and those that can be recycled, cannot be recycled economically. The little plastic recycling that used to exist is now halted because it was creating medical and estimated future environmental costs that exceeded the value of material. The industrial ovens do harvest the combustion energy and feed it back into the grid though, a lot of energy is actually reclaimed.
With TEKNICs' Clear path motors you could find real control of your setup. It might be out of question price wise for hobbyists but would be more precise.
Why don't you remake an extruder now? Will be much appreciated. respect ❤
PLEASE do a 2.0 Version of this! Please!!!! Let's see what your newer skills and more years of experience can do for a project like this.
Amazing! Could you repurpose a pellet extruder and just focus on the winding? How much did the bag of pellets cost?
The pellet extruder toolheads ars just small versions of this. Probably impractically low flowrates and possibly too inconsistent if you want to make full spools of filament.
The 25kg bag of 747S was an ebay find - iirc it was around 50€ at the time. ABS resin is pretty cheap when you buy in bulk (that is, tons at a time).
@@MadeWithLayers Oh okay so it really is a lot cheaper than buying rolls!