Hello everyone,
Dave asked us to publish some updates concerning the filament extrusion project, we will be using this topic to do so. We encourage any questions or suggestions you might have!
So who are you?
Van Alles Wat Ontwerp is a small design agency in Eindhoven (NL) founded by Koen, Gijs and Frits. We do all sorts of projects, both digital and physical, we love anything related to 3D-printing, have a look on our website if you are interested: http://www.vanalleswatontwerp.nl/
What’s the plan?
The plan is to produce filament using the extrusion machine Dave and Kees build. If all goes well everyone will be able to 3D-print using recycled materials. The machine that we will build needs to do two things; pull out filament at a constant rate and cool the extruded filament. We chopped the design of this machine in three major components; A: the ‘caterpillar’ (the thing that pulls on the filament), B: the ‘filament guider / coolers’ (the thing that supports and cools the filament) and C: the frame (the thing that holds space, matter and time together.
So what’s the latest?
Last Tuesday the extrusion machine 2.0 got delivered by Kees and Dave, we discussed about the design of the filament extrusion machine, we’ve included some pictures of the design in this post. Let’s talk a bit about the design.
The frame; we are using scaffolding tubes as a frame, with L-profiles and u-bolts we try to give the user the freedom to adjust the position of the different components.
The filament guiders / coolers; the most important function of these is to cool the filament. We will be using computer fan’s to take down the temperature of the filament as quick as possible. Cooling with water was an option we considered, but we figured that this would be a lot easier for other people to build.
The caterpillar; so this part is controlled by an Arduino to let the machine-operator dial in a specific pulling speed of the filament (this determines the filament diameter). After the caterpillar the filament will either drop in a bucket or be spooled on a filament spool.