I used 3DEVOs desktop filament extruder and
made my own 3D printing material in different colors at home to show you, how the manufacturing
process work, starting from plastic pellets over different colorants and additives all
the way to the extrusion process and I’ll even take a sneak peek at recycling failed
prints into new filament to print with. Let’s find out more! Guten Tag everybody, I’m Stefan and welcome
to CNC Kitchen. Part of this video is sponsored by Squarespace. Start a free trial today at squarespace.com/cnckitchen. Making filament for 3D printing is fundamentally
not that hard. You take plastic pellets, mix them with some
pigments, melt and feed them through a nozzle, and spool everything up. In this video, we’ll take a look at the
relatively simple process of extruding filament from virgin plastic pallets but also quickly
touch the challenges of recycling failed prints into a new spool of material which will be
the content of the next video in this series. If you don’t want to miss that, make sure
to be subscribed and select the notification bell! The raw material for most 3D printing filament
comes in the form of these plastic pellets. In this case, it’s PLA, though not all PLAs
are equal. More precisely, this right here is NatureWorks
4043D PLA, a pretty common, so-called material grade used to manufacture 3D printing filaments. Depending on your application, you can choose
between a ton of various grades differing in properties in our case, especially melt
flow index which is a measure of the viscosity of the melt. A low melt flow index means high viscosity
and is what you want for extrusion because the filament needs to keep its shape. A high melt flow index means a low viscosity
and is, for example, used in injection molding, where the material needs to flow into every
last bit of the mold easily. Let’s first make the most simple type of
filament – Natural PLA without any color or other additional additives besides what
the manufacturer put in. I weigh up a bunch of pallets and toss them
into the hopper of the 3DEVO Filament Composer 450 that 3DEVO kindly lent me for a couple
of months for my filament making and recycling experiments. Then I simply select the extrusion template
and wait for the machine to heat up. Once the selected temperatures in the four
heating zones are reached the machine automatically starts extruding. That is pretty important because polymers
degrade when they are exposed to high temperatures for longer periods of time and can potentially
clog the extruder if the material is not constantly moved through it. Honestly, that’s also happened to my Filastruder
and Mahor pellet extruder while experimenting with extruding shredded PET bottles because
I wasn’t aware of the severeness. After a couple of turns of the feeding screw,
the material starts coming out of the nozzle. Very interestingly – this nozzle doesn’t
have the diameter of the filament you want to make, but with its 4mm diameter is quite
a bit bigger. The reason for that is, that 3D printing filament
is usually not directly extruded into shape, but a puller wheel is actually dragging the
material to its final diameter that is adjusting the speed at which it’s pulling depending
on the diameter measured by an optical sensor. This way the machine can compensate for not
perfecty equal extrusion and die swell. To make sure that the filament doesn’t get
squished from the puller and to make sure that it doesn’t just droop down after it
leaves the nozzle, it gets cooled by two fans that blow on it. Since I had another material in the extruder
before adding the PLA, I’m first purging that out, and during this waiting time, the
temperatures within the whole machine stabilize to give us a more precise filament diameter
in the end. Once PLA is coming out of the nozzle and the
diameter stabilized, we can continue with spooling. You can spot when the other material is coming
out of the nozzle because the HDPE that was in the machine before crystalizes into a white
filament, whereas PLA remains mostly transparent. I put an old empty roll on the holder for
spooling, put it into the machine, and start the spooling wizard. I quickly snap off the filament, drag it through
the positioning lug and a small hole on the spool and then start the winding process. While the spool starts turning, I bend over
the end of the filament so that the material doesn’t come off the spool. And now we wait. The 3DEVO Composer continuously adds new pellets
through the hopper into the extruder, where the 3-zone compression screw first feeds it,
then compresses and starts to melt it and finally fully melts and especially homogenizes
it the so-called metering zone before it leaves the nozzle. Just as an interesting side note – you might
think that the material primarily melts due to the heaters around the barrel, but especially
in the metering zone at the end, a significant amount of heat is internally generated just
by the friction and the shear motion that the particles and also the melt does. Once all the pellets are consumed, I can turn
off the spooling, cut the filament and take my roll of material out of the machine. Not the perfect winding of the Prusa spools,
but honestly, I’ve seen worse, and this process can actually be optimized by fine-tuning
the settings as you’ll see in a bit. The color is really nice and clear and it
prints perfectly well. Transparent material is nice, but honestly,
because the prints always turn out not perfectly clear, we rarely print with such a material. This is where colors come in! Coloring plastics is usually done with a so-called
masterbatch. A masterbatch are pellets of highly concentrated
pigments held together mostly by the same or a compatible polymer that you’re processing—just
a more manageable and more controllable way than mixing powdered pigments with your pellets
before the extrusion process. My friends from DasFilament, a German filament
manufacturer from which I buy most of my PLA and PETG filament, were so kind and sent me
a bunch of samples to play around with. Since you’re usually only adding 1 to 5%
of the masterbatch to your normal pellets I only needed a couple of grams that I’m
sure the masterbatch manufacturers would not have been happy to sell to me. Let’s start with a red filament. For that, I add 2% of masterbatch to my PLA
pellets, thoroughly mix it and fill everything into the hopper. Of course, it again needs a couple of minutes
until we get red material out of the nozzle because we have to purge out the old material
at first. After that, it’s the same procedure as before:
Threading the end of the filament through the positioner and the spool and start winding. Since there aren’t many particles of masterbatch
in the pellets, it’s very important that the extruder screw build up pressure and performs
a lot of mixing and shearing motion in the metering zone, to mix the melt peroperly and
to get even colors. 3DEVO provides, besides their extruder, monitoring
software that you can use to track all the extrusion process parameters. In our case, when we only extrude some simple
PLA, the diameter is what concerns us. As we can see, the diameter fluctuates a little,
mostly between +- 0.05mm, sometimes a little more. I have already tried to tweak the process
parameters even more, using different temperatures, fan settings, and screw speeds, but since
I’m just starting using this machine, I’m okay with the results. Honestly, if you look at the size of the machine
that is just using as much desk space as a Prusa Mk3, you can’t expect the preciseness
of an industrial extrusion line. And here we go, a bunch of red filament that
again prints beautifully. Let’s next get even a little fancier and
add, besides the color masterbatch, also these sparkly pellets. I didn’t know how much to put into the mix,
so I used 2% blue masterbatch and 1% sparkle masterbatch. And into the hopper, it goes! Again, we need to purge out the red material
that’s still in the barrel. Still, this time the transition is actually
lovely because when the two colors start mixing, we get a really nice, purple color that sparkles. Here I’m purging everything out, but if
you ever bought rainbow filament, they actually stack different colors on top in the hopper
and create these transitions on purpose. Looking at the melt before was interesting,
though this time, it’s really mesmerizing to watch the molten PLA flowing out of the
nozzle that then gets slowly drawn to the final diameter and wound onto the spool. In the end, the filament got a little less
sparkly than I hoped, though still the blue with a hint of stars is quite a nice material
and also prints gorgeously. Since I adjusted the spooling parameters the
winding also already looks quiet a bit nicer. The part everyone probably was already waiting
for is to extrude some failed 3D prints. And yes, I also do have SHR3D IT, 3DEVOS desktop
plastics shredder, with which have already ground up a bunch of failed 3D prints, dried
the material, and extruded it, though it hasn’t been perfect yet and was sometimes even rather
bad. You have to understand that re-using failed
prints is way harder than extruding virgin material. You need to make sure that you only have the
same polymer, clean it, shred it, sieve it, shred it, sieve it, and dry it. Since you end up with quite a fluffy material,
feeding that at a consistent rate into the extruder can be quite tricky. I have already extruded a bunch of regrinds
and that printed beautifully afterwards, but since the process is not yet perfect, we’ll
cover the whole, detailed process in the next video. In the end, let’s also address the elephant
in the room, the price of the 3DEVO filament extruder, because they only start at around
5000 bucks. But before you scream, their machines are
not targeted at makers and people that want to extrude their own PLA filament at home
just because buying pellets is way cheaper than final filament. Their machines are intended to be used in
labs where you want to try out new polymers, additives or extrusion ideas at a small scale
before you go into full industrial production. For that, those machines are probably the
most compact yet capable things you can get. I honestly am very happy for this cooperation. Of course, it’s not maker equipment but,
due to my limited time, it gives me the possibility to try out things way quicker than I would
be on, for example, the Filastruder. I think trying things out on this machine
rather than not at all is still interesting for everyone. This might still inspire some of you to dedicate
your time to replicate or experiment with more affordable solutions. Though maybe as a last thought, if you are
thinking about 3D printing materials like PEEK and look at the filament prices, extruding
these on your own machine might actually give you a return on investment pretty soon! Speaking of return on investment - it doesn’t
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first website or domain purchase. So this was my first project using the 3DEVO
desktop filament extruder which helped me to understand way more things concerning this
process and I hope you learned something as well. There is so much stuff I want to try out in
the near future with it. Please let me know below if you have any questions
and what you’d like me to extrude or recycle with this machine! Thanks for watching everyone I hope you’re
all doing well! If you found this video helpful than leave
a like, share it with the community and make sure that you're subscribed. If you want to support the channel, head over
to Patreon, become a YouTube member or even check out my merch! Stay healthy, auf wiedersehen and until next
time !
