We had a filastruder running at the 3d printing meetup and the Deezmaker shop

We had a filastruder running at the 3d printing meetup and the Deezmaker shop today.

<–jelly. How was the output? Did it impress you enough that you might want to build one?

There was a lot in the mechanism that I would have done differently, but for the most part, the output looked a lot better than I expected.

He left us the roll he made. We’ll probably try at point.

That filament will be a torture test, since I was tweaking it a fair bit. For the intake on the winder, I’m thinking I will simply print a Gregs extruder and replace the hobbed bolt with a latex roller. No point inventing my own stepper-based filament feed system.

My filament drive mechanism is very tolerant of changes in diameter, but I’ll have to check the filament first to make sure it won’t jam the hot end. I’m thinking the easiest way to do that will be to grab a spare heater barrel and run the filament through it before trying to put it through the extruder.

You could make a hole of the proper diameter and pull the filament through to check.

I already have a hole of exactly the right diameter to check. It’s in the spare barrels.

Looks a bit like one of the spinning wheels of old. Except instead of spinning wool into yarn it’s using ground up plastic. Good effort!

Any word on how clean the filament was? Many home filament extruders talked about contaminants – curious to see if that is only when the system is operated for the first time, or if it would be an ongoing concern…

We haven’t tried printing with it, but there was no obvious evidence of contamination.

Experience from others has been that it takes maybe 1/2 to 1lb of ABS to flush it out on first use. You could probably cut that down by rinsing everything in alcohol or something after all the cutting and drilling is done.

BTW I think you were right about the latex rollers deforming and altering the effective diameter. I changed the Lyman roller to a modified Wades with a latex tube glued on the bolt. I ran two pieces of filament through it at different sizes. The feed rate was consistent on multiple tests for each size, but the larger filament fed a little slower. I’ve replaced the latex with a hobbed bolt, but I’m not confident that there isn’t any slippage when the idler is loose enough to not gouge the filament. My next step is to mold a roller from a harder urethane rubber.