Using Filastruder filament on my Ultimaker

[ggalisky 0]

Hey, Just wanted to share with you guys in the open source spirit about my filament extrusion adventures with the UM2. I am an active member over at soliforum, and I did a write up about 3mm ABS extrusion; the whole spool was made with the Filastruder.

Extruder type: Standard Filastruder with 3mm melt filter, enclosure and vertical setup with winder.

Picture of my set up:

On the winder laser sensor, I added straws where the PTFE goes to help guide the filament better.

You can find more pictures on my imgur here: http://ggalisky.imgur.com/all/

Printer type: Ultimaker 2

Pre-Drying

Many different types of plastics need to be pre-dried in order to get good quality filament and prints. The plastics that encounter frequently that need pre-drying are PLA, Nylon, TPU, and PC (polycarbonate). There are several more plastics that need to be pre-dried, but for simplicity I only listed a few. I used a food dehydrator I bought off of Amazon to dry all of my pellets. http://www.amazon.com/Presto-06300-Dehy … dehydrator . The dehydrator comes with mesh plates, so you need to find a way to stop the pellets from falling through. I use this: http://www.amazon.com/National-Presto-D … ZNA913RBA. I usually let the pellets dry for about 10-17 hours. After drying I seal the pellets in a zip lock bag with a silica gel packet inside, and add a label so I know what plastic it is.

Extrusion

MG94 ABS with red 3D Supply Source colorant

Extrusion temperature: 178 °C

Extrusion rate: 8 inches per minute.

Average diameter of filament: 2.73mm

Tolerances: + or – 0.02mm

Comments

Ever since I was able to achieve + or - 0.01mm tolerances by pre-drying my http://www.soliforum.com/topic/9818/or- … erances/, I have started predrying all of my pellets before extrusion including colorants. This also stops the filament from becoming brittle and makes IMHO filament that is better than the majority of the stuff out there. Most of the Filastruder users out there are 1.75mm people (including me), so switching to 3mm for the Ultimaker was a little bit of a struggle at first, but work well after some modifications to my set up. The first thing you will need to do is drill out you existing nozzle, or buy a 3mm nozzle from Filastruder. I used the non-melt filter nozzle that came with the Filastruder, and drilled it out with a 3/16in bit. This let me test out different diameters before drilling out my more expensive melt filter nozzle. If you have a vertical extrusion set up with a winder like me, you will need to modify the distance between the PTFE tubing and the servo powered filament guide. I added maybe 150mm, but you should experiment with yours to get the best results. Since 3mm ABS is stiffer than 1.75mm, it wants to flatten into a straight line instead of falling into a neat arc like 1.75mm. The path of the filament arc needs to be such that the filament coming out of the nozzle is not curved too much; if you look at the pictures bellow, you will see that the PTFE guide is at an angle to keep the filament from exerting too much force on the molten filament leaving the nozzle. Looking at the pictures will help you understand what I am talking about. Also, You will need to extend the length of the ribbon cable that comes with the Filawinder.

Printing

Unlike the majority of my material tests prior to this one, I used a SD2, but now I am using an Ultimaker 2 to print with. I used Cura as my slicer. In order to print ABS effectivily, I made an enclousre for my Ultimaker to help with delamination. For build plate adhesion I used PEI, but a glue stick or an ABS slurry will work just as well. I had no problems printing this at 70mm/second at 230 degrees Celsius and  at .2mm layer height.

Brittleness

1-10 scale, 1 is TPU and 10 is acrylic. 4

Layer bonding

1-10 scale, 1 is Nylon and 10 is acrylic. 4

Comparison to commercial ABS filament: I have never bought a roll of ABS filament thanks to the Filastruder

Pictures:

The red gear was printed with 3mm ABS

You can see what I mean by angling the PTFE guide

You can see the arc bulging near the nozzle; if the the PTFE guide was not angled, the stiff arc of filament would put too much stress on the molten filament, pulling it thin

Questions? Comments? Feel free to send me a PM, or post a reply down below!

Edited May 26, 2015 by chin

[owen 17]

Thanks for the write up. Very informative and good to know.

 

[gadgetfreak 7]

Very nice post, thank you for sharing. Did you ever try extruding PLA and if so was it more difficult?

Keep up the good work!

[ggalisky 0]

I have done quite a few these. If you go to my blog http://ggalisky.weebly.com/filament-extrusion-and-recycling, the second post down has links to all of them. Also, check out the other parts of the blog for more of my projects.