filament

98 Articles

Filament Dust Filter Helps Keep Your Print Quality High

September 6, 2020 by 19 Comments

If we’re honest, our workshop isn’t as clean as it probably should be, and likely many makers out there will say the same. This can have knock-on effects, such as iron filings clogging motors, or in this case, dust affecting the quality of 3D prints. Aiming to tackle this, [3Demon] built a fun Spongebob-themed dust filter for their 3D printer.

The filter works in a simple way. The Spongebob shell is 3D printed in two halves, with a hinge joining both parts. Inside each half, a section of sponge is stuck inside. The two halves are then closed with a snap fit, with the filament passing through a hole in Spongebob’s head and out through the (square) pants. With the sponge packed in nice and tight, dust is wiped from the filament as it feeds through bob to the printer.

While it’s important to install carefully to avoid filament feed issues, it’s an easy way to automatically clean filament during the printing process. You may be surprised just how dirty your filament gets after sitting on the shelf for a few months. Getting rid of such contamination decreases the likelihood of annoying problems like delaminations and jams. Avid printers may also want to consider making their own filament, too. Happy printing!

Can A 3D Printer Print Better Filament For Itself?

July 20, 2020 by 21 Comments

3D printed parts are generally no way near the strength of an equivalent injection moulded part and techniques such as a sustained heat treatment, though effective usually distort the part beyond use.

[CNC Kitchen] was investigating the results (video, embedded below) of a recent paper, that described a novel ABS filament reinforced by a “star” shaped Polycarbonate core, an arrangement the authors claim is resilient to deformation during the annealing process often necessary to increase part strength. While the researchers had access to specialised equipment needed to manufacture such a composite material, [CNC Kitchen’s] solution of simply using his dual extruder setup to directly print the required hybrid filament is something we feel, strongly resonates with the now old school, RepRap “print your printer” sentiment.

The printed filament seems to have reasonable dimensional accuracy and passing the printed spool through a heater block without the nozzle attached, ensured there would be no obvious clogs. The rest of the video focuses on a very thorough comparison of strength and deformation between the garden variety Polycarbonate, ABS and this new hybrid filament after the annealing process. Although he concludes with mixed results, just being able to combine and print your own hybrid filament is super cool and a success in its own right!

Interested in multi-material filaments? Check out our article on a more conventional approach which does not involve printing it yourself!

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Make Your Own Filament

July 17, 2020 by 52 Comments

According to [Alex] it is easy to make your own rolls of 3D printing filament, even though existing off-the-shelf solutions don’t work very well. His explanation for this is economics. He built a filament extruder using a high torque induction motor and gearbox that was locally sourced. He argues that shipping heavy gear around would make a similar extruder commercially unattractive. He sunk about $600 into the device but estimates that a company would need to charge at least $1,500 or more for the same thing. That may seem steep but as [Alex] points out, a 1 kg roll of filament really only has about 750 grams for filament and plastic pellets cost $2 to $3 per kilogram.

There are other costs, of course, like the electricity required to heat and move the plastic. Still, the system appears to use about $1 of electricity for every 10 kg of filament. You can see the process in the video below.

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Bolt-On Clog Detection For Your 3D Printer

May 19, 2020 by 19 Comments

Desktop 3D printing technology has improved by leaps and bounds over the last few years, but they can still be finicky beasts. Part of this is because the consumer-level machines generally don’t offer much in the way of instrumentation. If the filament runs out or the hotend clogs up and stops extruding, the vast majority of printers will keep humming along with nothing to show for it.

Looking to prevent the heartache of a half-finished print, [Elite Worm] has been working on a very clever filament detector that can be retrofitted to your 3D printer with a minimum of fuss. The design, at least in its current form, doesn’t actually interface with the printer beyond latching onto the part cooling fan as a convenient source of DC power. Filament simply passes through it on the way to the extruder, and should it stop moving while the fan is still running (indicating that the machine should be printing), it will sound the alarm.

Inside the handy device is a Digispark ATtiny85 microcontroller, a 128 x 32  I2C OLED display, a buzzer, an LED, and a photoresistor. An ingenious 3D printed mechanism grabs the filament on its way through to the extruder, and uses this movement to alternately block and unblock the path between the LED and photoresistor. If the microcontroller doesn’t see the telltale pulse after a few minutes, it knows that something has gone wrong.

In the video after the break, [Elite Worm] fits the device to his Prusa i3 MK2, but it should work on essentially any 3D printer if you can find a convenient place to mount it. Keep a close eye out during the video for our favorite part of the whole build, using the neck of a latex party balloon to add a little traction to the wheels of the filament sensor. Brilliant.

Incidentally, Prusa tried to tackle jam detection optically on the i3 MK3 but ended up deleting the feature on the subsequent MK3S since the system proved unreliable with some filaments. The official line is that jams are so infrequent with high-quality filament that the printer doesn’t need it, but it does seem like an odd omission when even the cheapest paper printer on the market still beeps at you when things have run afoul.

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Art of 3D printer in the middle of printing a Hackaday Jolly Wrencher logo

3D Printering: Will A Resin Printer Retire Your Filament-based One?

April 30, 2020 by 25 Comments

Adding a resin printer to one’s workbench has never looked so attractive, nor been so affordable. Complex shapes with effortlessly great detail and surface finish? Yes, please! Well, photos make the results look effortless, anyway. Since filament-based printers using fused deposition modeling (FDM) get solid “could be better” ratings when it comes to surface finish and small detail resolution, will a trusty FDM printer end up retired if one buys a resin printer?

The short answer is this: for users who already use FDM, a resin-based stereolithography (SLA) printer is not likely to take over. What is more likely to happen is that the filament printer continues to do the same jobs it is good at, while the resin printer opens some wonderful new doors. This is partly because those great SLA prints will come at a cost that may not always justify the extra work.

Let’s go through what makes SLA good, what it needs in return, and how it does and doesn’t fit in with FDM.

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Bubbly Filament Works Better Than You Think

February 17, 2020 by 22 Comments

Normally bubbles appearing in your extruded filament would be considered a bad sign, but it turns out you can now buy filament that has been specifically formulated to foam. [Stefan] from CNC Kitchen has doing some experiments with these bubbly filaments, and the results have been very interesting.

The filaments in question are VARIOSHORE TPU and LW-PLA, both by ColorFabb. Both filaments have a blowing agent added to the formulation, which releases gas as the temperature is increased. This causes bubbles to form, creating a cellular structure, which decreases the density and increases the flexibility of the printed part. This isn’t the first time that foaming is sold as a feature, but previously it was only done for aesthetic purposes in Polymaker’s Polywood filament.

Before putting the materials through his excellent test procedures, [Stefan] first goes through the process of tuning the print settings. This can be tricky because of the foaming, which increases the effective volume of the plastic, requiring careful adjustment of the extrusion rate. Foaming in the PLA filament reached its maximum foaming at 250 C, at which its density was 44% of the unfoamed filament.

In testing the physical properties, [Stefan] found that the tensile strength and stiffness of printed parts are reduced as foaming increases, but the impact strength is improved. He concludes that the lightweight PLA can have some interesting applications because of the reduced weight and increased impact strength, with 3D printed RC aircraft being an excellent example of this. It should also be possible to change the between layers, effectively sandwiching the foamed layers between solid skins.

[Stefan]’s videos are an excellent resource for those looking to master the finer points of 3D printing with different materials. He has reinforced prints with carbon fiber, played with extrusion widths and developed an ingenious gradient infill technique.

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A Beginner’s Guide To X-Ray Crystallography

January 21, 2020 by 6 Comments

In graduate school, I had a seminar course where one of the sections was about X-ray crystallography. I was excited, because being able to discern the three-dimensional structure of macromolecules just by shining X-rays on them seemed like magic to me. And thanks to a lackluster professor, after the section it remained just as much of a mystery.

If only I’d had [Steve Mould] as a teacher back then. His latest video does an outstanding job explaining X-ray crystallography by scaling up the problem considerably, using the longer wavelength of light and a macroscopic target. He begins with a review of diffraction patterns, those alternating light and dark bands of constructive and destructive interference that result when light shines on two closely spaced slits — the famous “Double-Slit Experiment” that showed light behaves both as a particle and as a wave and provided our first glimpse of quantum mechanics. [Steve] then doubled down on the double-slit, placing another pair of slits in the path of the first. This revealed a grid of spots rather than alternating bands, with the angle between axes dependent on the angle of the slit pairs to each other.

Photograph 51, an X-ray crystallogram of the B-form of DNA, by Gosling and Franklin, 1952. Source: Wikipedia

 

To complete the demonstration, [Steve] then used diffraction to image the helical tungsten filament of an incandescent light bulb. Shining a laser through the helix resulted in a pattern bearing a striking resemblance to what’s probably the most famous X-ray crystallogram ever: [Rosalind Franklin]’s portrait of DNA. It all makes perfect sense, and it’s easy to see how the process works when scaled down both in terms of the target size and the wavelength of light used to probe it.

Hats off to [Steve] for making something that’s ordinarily complex so easily understandable, and for filling in a long-standing gap in my knowledge.

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