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Granular HDPE Extruder Rebuild
From reading other peoples blog’s it appears the best extruder is one that has a sharp transition zone from hot to cold. On the Mendel this is achieved most often with a hollow cylinder of PTFE to act...
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Granular extruder, good news and bad.
I did some testing this afternoon on the granular extruder I recently put together. Things didnt go so well.. The disassembled extruder after testing. Note the solder plug has been pushed out and some...
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Granular HDPE Extruder V3 – Success.
After my previous failings at using using solder to cap an extruder barrels open end I have now turned to brazing. The solder method may have worked but it turns out I don’t have any high temperature...
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Granular HDPE Extruder – More photos.
I pulled apart the extruder today to take a look inside and I also made a few measurements of the extruded filament. The filament has swelled a little, but not as much as I thought. The die diameter...
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Gearing down the granular extruder.
It was recently questioned by Giles Bathgate as to why I don’t use the AC motor to drive the auger in the granular extruder. My first response was that I couldn’t adjust its speed and it would be...
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Is filament feedstock better for the environment than ‘nurdles’?
Something that has become painfully obvious over the last week is that handling granular HDPE is a very messy business indeed. These plastic nurdles, as i just discovered they are called, act a bit...
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Nurdle Extruder problem solving.
The Nurdle Extruder is still slowly progressing. Just to reiterate, the purpose of this extruder is to take food grade HDPE nurdles and produce a 3mm filament which can be spooled for later use on a...
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Warping – Large objects and the heated print bed.
More of the same ‘out loud’ thinking on the issue of warping in this post to follow on from the last post on warping fundamentals. In particular, thinking about how the speed of a print, the size of an...
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Solvent Compatibility and plastics.
While recently trying to apply my limited chemistry knowledge to work out which solvents will dissolve ABS (and failing miserably) I came across the handy table shown below. It depicts which solvents...
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Cryogenic Granular Grinding
I recently came across this industrial grade meet grinder. Its located in a laboratory used for, among other things, injection moulding. I’m told that its used to grind plastic granules down into a...
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