Can you 3D Print with Hot Glue?

these are Hot Melt glue sticks which go into a hot glue gun and most of you probably have one at home I often use it to explain 3D printing to people who have never seen this process because isn't an fdm 3D printer just a hot glue gun controlled by a computer yet have you ever noticed that even though Hot Melt glue sticks are very popular there isn't any hot glue filament for 3D printers available to buy I tried to change that and make the first Hot Melt glue filament which turned out to become the most sticky flexible and cursed material I've ever made and I didn't only make it for the giggles but also for something I wanted to do for a while 3D printed iron on patches which have a layer of hot glue on the bottom and then a stylish 3D print on top let's find out more good and talk everybody I'm Stefan and welcome to CNC [Applause] kitchen this video is sponsored by kiwi Co get 50% off your first month of any monthly line by using the link below even though you might have never used a 3D printer before I'm sure you have used a hot glue gun and in a way they are very similar and this is the reason why I've been using this comparison to explain 3D printing to people who are unfamiliar with the process both have a heated nozzle in which plastic gets molden and then pushed out of on a 3D printer this is usually 1.75 mm filament made from pla ptg or a large variety of other other materials hot glue guns use these glue rods which when molden are very sticky in order to quickly connect two parts with each other and that forms a tough Bond when cooled down again most Hot Melt glue sticks are primarily made from a polymer called Eva which you might know from its foam state which is used for foam pads or even your garden Crocs when used as a Hot Melt adhesive Eva is a bit modified with additives to give it its stickiness and flow properties but why am I talking about this when I was at formex last year I visited the booth from Mosaic manufacturing who showed a really interesting application of 3D printing they develop the process to print labels and logos for sports appeal that are conventionally cut from fabric sewn together and often embroidered printing these logos doesn't only give them the full individualization and automation capability of 3D printing while still retaining a very good thick textured look yet how do you apply them to your shirts they didn't tell me all of their secret but I kind of understood that they are using some kind of form of Hot Melt glue adhesive as a base so that you can iron them onto fabric I tried to find a vendor that produces such a Hot Melt glue adhesive filament but I simply didn't find one I enjoy doing things myself so I thought why not make this interesting filament myself since I have all of the equipment at hand this would be one application but what other uses do you see for Hot Melt glue adhesive filament I mean Joe Bernard could in in the future 3D print his hot glue rocket instead of casting it but what might be other valuable use cases let me know in the comments so what do we need for making Hot Melt glue filament well first of all hot glue sticks and a filament extruder the filament maker is basically a continuous Hot Melt glue gun that will feed the plastic VRE screw to a nozzle where it melts and exits through a small hole and then it will ideally wind the finished continuous filament onto a spool complete Hot Melt glue sticks are obvious ly too big to fit into the screw and even if I cut them into smaller pieces they still won't fit so I had to shred them into small bits I didn't dare to throw them into my commercial Shredder that I usually use for Plastics because I feared that it would eventually glue everything together and cause a huge mess so I took out my blender and put a bunch of the cut down pieces of Hot Melt glue in I started TR treading but I quickly noticed that it didn't really make good progress because the glue sticks are very flexible and even if they're not Molen they have the tendency to stick to stuff with only a small amount of shredded material I stopped this first attempt and thought about how to make this more efficient I got to think about BPS space hot glue rocket again and how it shattered when Joe cooled it down to much to protect it from the hot sun so I thought why not use this property for good and see if cooling down the plastic would help to shred it unfortunately it's kind of hard to get your pants on dry ice here in Germany if you don't live in a big city so I had to resort to Simply putting my cut down glue sticks into the freezer compartment of my fridge here in the studio after a couple of hours I got the pieces out of the fridge and quickly put them into the blender the cold worked wonders and the glue stick shredded beautifully not only did the freezer make the glue stick brittle so that the blender shattered them instead of cutting them but it also kept the temperatures down so that nothing adhered to the blade after letting the blender run for half a minute I sift the particles and put the big chunks back into the blender for another round once I noticed that everything warmed up and got soft I again sifted the material and put the rest back into the freezer for later this already left me with some material to work with yet since there was some condensation on the particles I decided to first put them into my drying oven to make sure no moisture was left then it was time to extrude the shredded Hot Melt glue sticks into filament or I mean at least try it it is very crucial to set the proper temperature on the machine so that the material melts and has the right consistency since I had no clue where to start I did the best thing I could think of and simply plucked in my hot glue gun to see how hot it got as a starting point after a bunch of minutes I got to around 170° C which was more than I expected but also rather good because that's in the range I also extruded pla in the past since the consistency of the Hot Melt glue was very thin at that point I already lowered the preheat temperature for the altme 3D EXT rer to only 160° C there was still material from my last experiment in the barrel I first had to flush out before I could expect clean and pure Hot Melt glue filament once it was up to temperature I added some of the shredded Hot Melt glue and turned on the extruder initially there still was a ton of white pla from my Cutlery experiment coming out of the nozzle until the consistency and color changed initially it looked like only a ton of foam came out of the nozzle from the temperatures being sign ific anly too high for the material I started lowering the temperatures and steps and at last the foam got away but the material still remained Way Too Thin in consistency to combat this I further decreased the temperatures until the material became significantly more viscous when I reached 90° C extruder temperature I had the feeling that I could try spooling it when working with normal 3D printing material you load the end of the filament into the feeder which guides it to an empty spool where it gets wound up the speed of spoiling gets adjusted by a filament position sensor if it droops down more it pulls faster if it's getting pulled up too much it reduces feeding speed even though I turned on the cooling fan to its maximum speed the glue stick filament was still super sticky at that point adhering to everything that it only even slightly touched so using the filament position sensor was out of the question and I would have to adjust the pulling speed manually yet even only getting the hot glue string bloated into the feeder itself was another pain because it was so sticky and flexible that it got constantly jammed in the gears or the PTFE tube so I removed the tube and would have been super happy to Simply get a string of material out of the top but even that didn't work because it was just too tacky and then also the flow almost completely stopped so I called her a day to figure out what I could do differently okay even though Recycling and biopolymers were in part of this video I have to give a huge shout out to today's video sponsor Ki Co because when their latest creator arrived I noticed that they started packing their boxes as well as the stuff inside the Box in home compostable plastic foil in order to reduce waste that pollutes to our nature Kudos I think this is a great move and others should follow this example if you have never heard about kiiko you must have been living under a rock because their crates which are delivered to your doorstep every month contain projects all around steam that will naturally spark the excitement for exploration crafting and making in your kids and are even fun for you with we currently get the koala crate for all daughter which is one of Ki CO's nine subscription lines for all ages she's always super excited when a new box arrives because she knows that this means that she'll be building something awesome explore things or just learn something new kco crates contain everything you need for the project so you can do them anytime you want without the need to get glue or batteries from the store kico crates are designed by experts and I love seeing the joy interest and excitement they naturally spark in my my daughter every time we build them together each box also contains a magazine that has additional info on the theme of the crate to dig a little bit deeper if you like K COA has subscription lines for todos to teenagers and even I enjoy building their projects if you want to do something good for your kids give them something useful that has a lasting impact or look for a great gift for someone else you can get 50% of the first month of Kiko's monthly subscription if you use the code CNC or go to k.com CNC kico helps to make your kids the innovators of the future so use the link in the description to check them out and get a great deal so there were two main things at the moment I had to fix and this was that no material came out of the nozzle anymore and the sticky filament that was almost impossible to handle let's work on the first the filament extruder has a fine mesh before the nozzle which is called a melt filter it is meant to filter out bigger particles that could otherwise potentially clock the nozzle of your 3D printer since I didn't have any flow I thought I'd check if it was clear once I unscrewed it from its Barrel I understood why the extruder was blocked so I extruded the Hot Melt glue at 90° C yesterday there seemed to be leftovers of pla in the barrel that at some point got loose and since the temperatures were so low it didn't became liquid and accumulated before the Melt filter I feared that there were more of these particles left so I just removed it completely for now when when I restarted the extruder it was working again and there were still a ton of particles flushed out that previously got stuck in the front of the Melt filter problem one is fixed but how are we able to make the material less sticky so it can go through the feeder when handling my leftover Hot Melt glue sticks I realize that they have an oily or waxy texture on the outside which makes them not stick to each other and maybe even helps feed them in the hot glue gun so I resorted to something I haven't done in a while but which was really quite common when I started 3D printing and this was installing a filament Oiler so I soaked a cotton pad with machine oil and basically wrapped it around our sticky Hot Melt glue filament before it entered the PO and that really did the trick the thin film of all removed most of the stickiness and let it feed through the polar so in this configuration I was able to make my first small batch of glue stick [Music] filament [Music] it wasn't fast the filament diameter was a bit too small and it didn't wind onto the spool but I made 3D printing filament from ordinary glue sticks how about that I had to babysit the extruder during the whole process making sure that the shredded material fed into the extruder screw and that I adjusted the P speed to not over stretch it once most of my sh Red Hot Melt glue sticks were gone I stopped the process and tried spooling the filament onto a wheel even though this was oil material it was a pain to untangle because it still partly stuck to itself and was incredibly floppy in the end this was my yield from the first batch not a lot but probably good enough for a first test print the material was very clear with a lot of flexibility really feeling like a wet noodle it reminded me a lot of the most flexible filament I have ever used which is FX 60a my durometer said that at least the glue stick was around 75a in Shore hardness but the slightly undersized diameter gave it an even more flexible feel in order to find out how well and with which settings it prints I tried to load it into my prusa Mark 4 unfortunately it's basically impossible to get the floppy string to feed through the filament sensor so I had to remove the spring in the mechanism to make it feed I didn't have a ton of this precious filament so I had to use it very carefully as a first test I printed a simple Cube I compensated the lower diameter by increasing the flow to 150% I played a bit around with the temperatures and ended up between 180 to 190° C for the best results here unfortunately the fun didn't really last that long after only some millimeters it jammed the whole extruder I tried fixing that with another filament Oiler but I couldn't print more than half a 50% scale 3D Beni until everything locked up again which led me to disassemble the whole extruder unfortunately that destroyed a bit of my plans for the ironon batches I wanted to use my pra XL load the glue stick filament into one hat and then have the other tools loaded with different collor materials the prusa XL has the same print head as the markv and will therefore also not be able to print with this new filament properly I don't necessarily think it's a fault of the printer but the undersized material simply has the even bigger tendency to clock than other flexible so my last resort was digging out my old ender3 with the mutant tool Plate System and installing the extruder for flexibles on it the Omnia drop due to its super short and constrained filament path it's usually able to handle every flexible material with ease I loaded the glue stick filament into it and printed another simple Cube at 190° C nozzle temperature and oh boy did that print look nice the material was super transparent and extremely soft to touch I stopped after a couple of millimeters because you [Applause] know precious material with this positive result I started printing another half-sized 3D Beni which initially printed really well yet even though I had the cooling fan fully turned on and printed slowly it still sometimes remains too hot degrading the print quality but if you have ever worked with Hot Melt glue you will know that it sometimes take ages to solidify and I regularly get my fingers burned and stuck together because I didn't wait long enough before touching the material so bad and slow cooling might just be an inherent property of glue stick filament other than that I think it really looked nice for what it is especially in some flat sections and with that out of the way it was finally time to try out if we can print iron on badges on a 3D printer since I can't use my prusa XL with the undersiz material I'll be printing on my mutant Ender but have to switch the filament manually I'll be printing one layer of glus stick filament and then the other layer with color faps varos short TPU this is a flexible material that Foams up during printing which gives it a very soft touch and almost fabric-like texture and what better way to try this out than printing the Channel logo for some swag I used the layer height of 0.2 mm for the first layer and 0.3 for the second one after the first layer I added a pause command so that the printer goes into its parking position and then the two commands to edit the nozzle temperature and the flow vario sh TPU forms up depending on the temperature you print it at so you need to reduce the Extrusion multiplier and in my case this was all the way down to 45% so I co the build plate with glue stick as a release layer and started printing the [Music] samples [Music] I initially had to tweak the settings a little but ended up with some simple well-looking patches that were ready to iron on I went home got our electric iron out and set it to the cotton program I honestly had no clue how hot it was going to get and was surprised when I saw around 180° C on my infrared thermometer I then placed the first Iron on badge on an old t-shirt put baking paper over it to not ruin the iron with seeping out Hot Melt glue and then heated everything up at first glance everything worked and the label stuck very well to the fabric I only had the impression that it got a bit too hot and melted the TPU as well I didn't heat up the second one as long and it turned out better still with room for improvement after that I printed some more complex designs with up to three colors and dialed in the process a little bit better for some really nice surface finish I'm sure you could even produce some way better looking patches but I mean I'm an engineer not a designer I put the first test shirt that I made even in our washing machine that it survived very well only some of the corners slightly lifted after the dryer and this might also be the reason why mosaic's 3D printed patches still get sewn to the fabric here so I guess the proof of concept was successful oh what do you think I now only need to create some better designs and maybe get glue stick filament with a better diameter to start a big scale merch production I mean would you buy 3D printed patches or would you rather be interested in this filament to make some yourself this was a really interesting project and I think I tried out a rather interesting use for the hot glue stick filament that I initially thought I was only making for the giggles Hot Melt glue or this modified Eva material was quite tricky to work with it's way softer than I initially expected which didn't only make shredding the material challenging but also simp printing it on a 3D printer the other challenge was the stickiness of the raw material which I reduced with some oiling some might be worried that this reduces the material strength yet I've shown years ago that the effect at least for oiling pla is negligible even if my patches are not the best design I was able to show that you could print your own very nicely looking ones yourself which are fast to make locally fully individualized and even hold up in the washer in the end I'd like to know what you think about glue stick filament where do you see uses for it or do you think this was rather a waste of time leave a comment down below thanks for watching everyone I hope you found this video interesting if you want to support my work head over to Patron or become a YouTube member also check out the other videos in my library I hope to see you in the next one of v in and [Music] [Applause] goodbye

Channel: CNC Kitchen

Views: 721,300

Keywords: 3d printing, 3d printer, hot glue gun, 3d print, glue stick, how to, recycle filament, cnc kitchen, filament extruder, artme3d, iron on patches

Id: alwsRqh5W8M

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 23 2024