Water bottle to Filament (Polyformer Troubleshoot)

okay I think today is the day we try it hopefully this will work out okay and not go up in Flames so in this video we're going to be taking a look at how to use the polyformer to turn plastic bottles into filament pet that you can use to prevent something at the end of this video we will also be printing something using recycled pet right now we are picking it up right after we finished assembly of the polyformer naturally the first thing to do is to make sure all the settings are correct I would highly recommend checking the Discord as the settings and the correct settings are always changing depending on which version of the polyformer you're using start shows the temperature not going to change too much phase shows the feed rate correct it from the default value [Music] there all right so let's see if this still works yes it does to change the settings it is very simple simply follow the guide and input the correct numbers using the LED screen interface and now we are on our first bottle for Extrusion the bottle has already been pre-cut and put into the ribbon cartridge after the bottle is in the ribbon cartridge all you have to do is make sure the initial pet that's going to be fed into extruder is thin enough to slip through the nozzle more temperature is at 220. if you want to see how we cut a bottle and feed into the ribbon cartridge you can refer to the previous video or scroll ahead on this one if you want to see how to feed the initial pet in through the nozzle and use pliers to pull the initial bit out you can also scroll ahead on this video that means this is going to go on like this it shouldn't this be rotating the other one and now we encounter our first problem luckily this one is very easily fixable there is an option in the settings that says reverse false simply click on it and you reverse the direction of the motor there you go there's a setting to make it Go reverse now you encounter our second problem and it's a rather large one it's the gearbox not being strong enough this was a very difficult thing to try to troubleshoot but luckily I'm going to skip through all of this because all of these problems are now Legacy problems ever since the sun Planet gear update in summary I spent a lot of time here and it cost me quite a lot of mental energy but you don't have to worry about this ever due to the new update that is out there is an update we were having troubles with the gearbox it wasn't quite pulling the filament well enough and then when I went online they said that they came out with a new gearbox ago I printed the original gearbox a month ago so this is a very very recent update and hopefully this will fix the troubles we're having right now with it slice it on produce the slicer this is now outdated new gearbox is supposed to be much more lenient in terms of the force it's supposed to give power the old ones was just not pulling well enough so once again the biggest advice for building the polyformer or working the polyformer is to always check on Discord because they can now speak from experience that there's a lot of headache you can usually avoid just by making sure you have the most up-to-date version with a new gearbox completely installed I decided to try to protrude my second water bottle of the project all right a bottle and plug in now that is plugged in let's click Start okay let's check out the new gearbox so as I mentioned the new Sun Planet gearbox eliminated a lot of the issues with the folders but it is still in itself not perfect not moving very fast is it it does feel stronger being optimistic I hope that it could still work so I decided to try protruding I will later find out that the new planet Sun gearbox had a Loose Gear [Applause] let's see if this will pull although better than its predecessor the planet gearbox was still quite weak at this stage now it is now running on motor power later you'll come to see that this problem is very intertwined with problem number three actually pulling anything through kind of I mean so far so good so that's looking pretty okay here's everything in the back and that is the filament coming out before we get to the Loose Gear issue there is one problem here that was I really quickly presented and very easily fixed and that is the rattling noise update turns out these things were in too tight that's what we were getting that in kind of angry sound but now that I've loosened them a little bit it's kind of going a little bit better oh just like the previous design it is now completely stopped right so to stop this I'm simply gonna just like that at this point in the video I would come to realize the Loose Gear is the main cause of all of these issues it's definitely spinning but sometimes skips and sometimes it does this this is what happened okay I think I see the problem now this is the problem you see that that's moving if I press on here I can hold it still so this skier doesn't stay in place there is a hole here I think the intention was that you would put a screw through that hole and that would lock the motor's rotor in place I did not put a screw through this but in my defense there is no schematic for this at the moment there's just an online fight that says things where they're supposed to be but literally nothing else the Online files mentioned nothing about screws this one is eight millimeter one a screw through the hole by itself did not hold the gear in place so I figured I would try to do a little bit of DIY here okay so let's come to this so what I currently did is I took a drill and I made this bigger and now hopefully I can put this Heat insert right here but that goes well you gotta fix the problem all right so just the recap what we did was we used this drill bits to make that hole in the middle a lot bigger so a threaded insert or Heat insert could fit into it the drill size that was used to make the initial hole was uh that one and then after making it bigger we took our soldering iron and took one of our extra heat inserts and plugged it in and now a screw can go in there and this one is definitely not coming loose or moving so this is tight all right let's see if this is going to be a horrible idea or not I said that mainly because this chord had not tried this yet and because of how new the update was writing wasn't sure if that was going to work should I see you could use a smaller screw from this I guess we could just carve it a little bit better in place so it kind of fits better so we can just push it off a little bit make it go more just because the heat inserts is more further in so all right to update I shaped it enough and now if you look directly here and until it goes in a little bit the other thing is we need this part to be out of the range of the planet gears because otherwise it doesn't get in the way if the head of the screw was too outwards it would actually disrupt the planet gears from rotating hopefully that fixes everything would be good and if I apply a little bit of force there's a stop oh it doesn't it's really pushing me now all right let's give it a go the person who made the planet Sun Gear design saw the way that I did this and actually decided to fix the design up a little bit I never saw the new design because as you'll see this heat inserted Center gear holds everything perfectly in place [Music] and then let's do this okay all right so we are officially trying to turn everything and see if it's gonna go with the planet gear adjustment it's about to be pulled about to switch over to rotational Gear power so I'm gonna Slide the arm in place [Music] and now it is at the mercy of the gearbox let's see it'll work okay let me come back in a few minutes and see if this time we will actually make it through the end I think the sound is coming from the motor and although it is working I'm not sure if this is good for the longevity of the engine sounds still quite violent but it is still going and it's been well over 20 minutes in this point that is almost one water bottle completely done then made it to the end I wanted to see if we can just maybe Lube up the area to decrease the noise and then we'll print one more this is pretty self-explanatory the gears were having too much friction if you can see it but there is tons of just tons of just it looks like scary scraps it looks like it's really rough okay let's see if maybe a little bit of lube helps it along I just used some of the machini oil left over from the prusa service as you see most of the engine's problems are completely fixed at this point and we will go through our first complete protrusion with no noise with this green bottle [Music] all right trial number two and it keeps on going [Music] let's see if this miraculously makes it all the way through one water bottle we are near the end we almost went through an entire bottle and this is the first successful full protrusion we've done so that's good and this has not made any noises from like the first one that we did and the last that is in foreign all right it's not quite perfect it's like almost the full circle most of this is full circle where I'm not sure if this is good enough for 3D printing with I may consider known as actually the fact that this is kind of still a semi-crest move semi-crest moon means the ribbon diameter that you initially inputted was slightly too thin since the motor box is working now I decided to just print a second one with a wider ribbon this is kind of the product there I skipped it a few steps there but uh basically I tried it with a much wider ribbon and it did not work that well still problem with the semicircle was I was afraid the feeder or the little gears that hold the filament on the prusa would not be able to attach themselves to a semicircle versus a full circle nonetheless because of how consistent the filament looked I kind of figured I would try to print with it right then all right is it horrible idea day as it might be I'm gonna clean this and we're gonna try to print something very simple using the recycle filament from one of the water bottles today let's just heat this up and uh see if this can actually go through all right we are heated let's see if this will go through spoiler alert it did not luckily though nothing jammed the nozzle that's not good so the problem is it isn't being melted in the very beginning it kind of went down a little bit but then I had to give it a bit of push because I think based on how thick this is it might actually not be good enough to be held on and the Bruce is meant to hold on to 1.7 I will find this out later 1.6 millimeters works just fine see the main issue is it's not really not really expanding it's kind of just staying to where it is like for all of the pla that I have on there those are all very consistently 1.7 so we've cleared that the thickness of the filament is not the problem the problem as it turns out is actually because of two reasons the first one is temperature and the second one is nozzle cleanliness this stage however I did not think about those two factors yet so using some tips from this chord I decided to do a wider cut of the ribbon to try to increase the thickness of the filament I was looking through old footage the other day and I realized that when we were printing the Carabiner we actually weren't doing the settings that I actually got just to clarify while I was doing The Wider cut I had realized that I was only printing at 230 degrees which is the prus's recommended heat for pet after realizing this I stopped the new cut and decided to Sprint the old one at 260 but it still did not work and that's because of Reason number two which is a dirty nozzle that's actually plastic or not the tip here is actually the exact shape of the nozzle which means it's definitely making it to the edge it's just not making it the extra step we had fixed the temperature issue and I've adjusted everything accordingly to 260 degrees and the only possible explanation for not protruding according to me at this stage of the video was that the filament itself was still not 1.75 but 1.60 knowing this and thinking that was the case I decided to continue with the wider cut of the ribbon in hopes that when we protrude it it's going to be a much more Fuller filament and being Fuller it might expand to 1.75 I will later find out that this was not really necessary but this was the next step that we tried it feels like it should work during this protrusion I came up with an upgrade to switch from plier power to automatic power as soon as possible this piece on the spool isn't meant to hold on to the initial bits of plastic as it comes out of the extruder there I did a quick mini adjustment to this because originally the plastic will actually go through this nozzle here come out on the other side you have to use pliers to pull and manually extrude it all the way from here down to here and then across the back and then all the way here all manually until we can force it to be on this piece and then this piece would pull by the holder here and what I did was I attached a piece of ribbon to this part that and attached to the spool and I made it connect to this piece one like this and what that does is now when the first manual protrusion comes from here this is just long enough to catch it straight from the get-go as soon as it gets pulled through a little bit can be attached already and go on automatic molder Powers now moving on back to the wider Cuts part is Holo I've plugged in what we just extruded into there and now I'm going to see if I could get anything to come out of the extruder before I tried to extruding this time my anxiety got the better of me and I figured I would check that the nozzle actually lets anything through as I mentioned previously one of the other issues why it wasn't extruding was because the nozzle is incredibly dirty and it had to be replaced and at this point I realized that there was quite a lot of resistance and that's what hinted me towards the fact that I needed to change a nozzle so we're going to turn this towards us like so and this one goes in here have you ever seen any of my videos this nozzle has been there since the very beginning has never been changed what the heck that looks solid and kind of gross I think you're supposed to switch nozzles when you're switching materials because I went from pla to PT turns out the nozzles are really cheap this was around 20 bucks and it came as a pack of 20. we're going to plug this in and then see if maybe that's the problem why we couldn't get anything like that filament to actually go through this is 0.7 millimeters and we're gonna put the new nozzle in here let's just scoot this on and that is the new nozzle in I think the smartest thing to do after hitting the nozzle in there is probably to do a recalibration okay so we are at the stage where it says select nozzle preheat temperature which matches your material so I guess this is the first test we're gonna do and now it's preheating the nozzle and we're gonna feed it our uh our recycled pet I wouldn't realize but this is 230 and as I mentioned previously we need this to be 260 for recycled pet I'm going to turn that off because that's not gonna fly resume the calibration later let's see what's going on this is a familiar sight it's just because we didn't use 260 degrees it's just not making it all the way through okay so I asked this recorder and they said that you should probably print on 260 to 270 degrees Celsius there's a few different problems I have to work with at the moment number one is I switched a nozzle I need to recalibrate everything on the prusa to recalibrate it we actually need to print a little bit or have a little bit of material come out I only had pla on me and I didn't want to you know extrude pla to actually get the calibration right then have to replace the material into pet so what I decided to do was I got film it in p-e-t this is not recycled film in PT of course this is just regular pet filament and I'm going to calibrate the prusa with the pet filament Let It Go through the new nozzle that we recently put in after it's completely calibrated we'll try to print with recycled petg at 260 to 270 degrees right so we have started the calibration process so we're at the calibration point right now we have to choose the type of material and we're going to choose pet this time that's the one we want to print with eventually here is pet so we can actually calibrate the machine and have the nozzle ready for pet my concern right now is if it's actually going to come out because we did switch a nozzle oh and it's coming out look at that yes it is with the right color now we'll calibrate the distance and all of that so this is going to be the last time we're going to touch the Amazon shipped pet because we're going to be using recycled PT from here on end I'm going to bring the setting to ASA because that brings the nozzle at around 260 degrees and then let me just move the axis to the middle it is time to try the Recycled pet so this is the Recycled pet and we know the nozzle currently works for pet as well so recycle PT as you can tell it's coming from a middle section there and so this is the Recycled pet and you kind of tell there's a bit of a cup there as well so we're gonna let this go through and see if anything comes out at the other end you know something's coming out but something tells me that this is just the pet that we had previously so I'm gonna see if I can push it a little bit more and see if we can get started using the pet from the water bottle at this point we are now extruding the proper recycled pet it is very easy to distinguish which pet came from the store in which pet was from a recycled water bottle the ones that are recycled tons of Bubbles and impurities I think it's actually printing it this might this might be printing it okay let's do this let's see if this is a good or not so this is what came out of there at the very beginning here this was the store-bought pet it looks like this is quite clear it's quite consistent and then this is actually from the water bottle there's tons of bubbles everywhere is that good these are bad news bad news is I don't think this is going to print perfectly well but the good news is this is definitely not the PT that we bought so I think it's actually printing from pet that we got from the water bottle so this confirms kind of two things the first thing is that we could print with pet because and the second thing is even if this is kind of a hollow tube it's still printing I think we're going to do is I'm going to adjust the thing that she wanted to print which is a carabiner so if you can print with recycle.pet that would have been the end of our project here because that means we've done it I've put in the STL file into the prusa slicer I changed the settings around to 260 for the nozzle and still 85 degrees for the bed and hopefully this is going to work much better now hard to see there but there is string we have the Recycled p-e-t right here being fed through there and going through here and now we just gotta hope that nothing completely screwed the stuff up okay so I'm noticing a problem and I think is that the extruder is not letting a lot of filament through at all you tell exactly what was going wrong here and that's that the temperature is currently set at 240 when the printing temperature is meant for 260. before it crashed it actually LED through some of this and that looks like pretty decent base layer as you can see I did not realize the temperature was 240 and I wouldn't realize that until way later in this video thinking this was still just because the filament wasn't quite full enough I decided to cupped up another water bottle and use even wider ribbon although the wider ribbons does not really play in an essential role for the film to be fed through it does improve the quality of the print so I guess although not a major point of concern a slightly thicker and much more Fuller filament thus print with better quality and temperature we are going to go for is all set we're gonna start to get this thing into place it's just the initial bit has to be absolutely super thin I'm gonna move this over make it go under attach this to [Music] that side maybe we needed that there we go okay temperature is 230 and steady we are getting protrusion through and I think we're good so it is still currently going and doing quite well actually this probably is towards the end of our journey here I see it's kind of towards the end of our journey here because the goal here has always been to Sprint with recycled pet and I think we're going to achieve it with this Extrusion here I'd like to share with you all the different failed things we've done using the polyformer before we got to something usable uh this is from Mountain Dew which is pretty good this is from my forgot what model but it actually turned out pretty okay this is one of the first ones we have ever done and as you can tell absolute garbage this is from another very thin water bottle and this has the same issue as the most recent one that we tried printing with and that it just has too much air bubbles and too much gaps in the actual print I sanded this one that's why it looks very very opaque I wouldn't really trust this to go into my first set there I don't think this is a good idea this one is very rough around the edges and I'm pretty sure it's this one yet it's not even a full moon because this is the time when the extruder motor was so bad I figured I'd give it less work to do by giving it much more thinner ribbons than I'm supposed to I think this was meant to be a 10 millimeter ribbon I think we used the five polyformer is actually a pretty difficult project all considered this is not gonna be fit through because it's half a moon it's not thick enough this one wasn't bad um but once again it's still kind of a semi Moon so this is the first water bottle I think we fully went through but I think I might have manually helped it go through that time and this was from the most recent one it's got that problem with the half moon thing going on again it's one two three four five six seven out of the first 10 tries we did seven of them were failures and three of them are currently babies regardless from an amateur's perspective the polyformer does require quite a lot of self-directed learning a troubleshooting part it requires a lot of patience and a lot of fine-tuning and like I said after the 10th Extrusion of hold that kind of failed and needed readjustments towards the gearbox and I just lost motivation to do it really it was just not very nice to keep trying hopefully it works otherwise this is kind of just jumping the gun I I don't feel like there's that much more troubleshooting left to do but maybe this video come out to be like 40 minutes and turns out this is just the beginning but we'll see so three successful attempts about seven failures in there all right so just a quick update on here that actually looks pretty good these aren't even semimoons they're not half Moons they are full thickness filament I heard a snap then I came here and I thought something had broken but we're actually done take this part off as well and screw that pull that out and now we have our filament all of this looks really good except for the end here and the end here looks something like this so this is the reason why some of the other ones we've thrown away we had to throw away because if it always looked like this and it was a semi-circle this is not wide enough to be like fed through the 3D printer extruder so let's cut it here still kind of looks like a tube but definitely a much better tube than we had previously all right so let's give that a go we're going to preheat this and I'm going to bring this to ASA even though we're not printing with Asa Asa has a preheating section of 260 degrees which we want this to be out okay let's feed this through there we go all right now a little bubbly like the last one but not horrible foreign still got that dotted pattern of a little bit of blanks there but you know what it actually looks much better than the other one we did this might actually work yeah that looks like proper printing filament this print requires 31 minutes hopefully I have enough filament at this point Okay so I found out an issue with this one if you look right now you'll see that the temperature was actually at 240. now the reasons of Defenders at 240 is because I set the initial temperature to be 262 but I made it only 260 for the initial layers so this isn't a filament issue this is a me issue but if you look everything looks pretty good still so let me change up some of these settings over here and then we'll come back to this all right this time I did make sure that everything was staying at 262. hopefully this is the last I'm gonna deal with this I'm going to charge what I've been showing here I actually really don't like family foreign we are 15 minutes away at this point and it is still going strong we are officially really close to running out of filament but we are also three minutes away from finishing printing and I think we're gonna be good so what I'll do is I'm just going to set this up and let the last three minutes play out he made it this far into video well congratulations you are here for the very first successful rpet print and we are zero minutes from finishing so we are almost completely done at this point [Music] now we are done the complete Carabiner printed with completely recycled pet from a water bottle okay well first of all uh we are almost out so I really wanted to unload the filament as soon as possible just because I'm not sure how much I trust the pet that's recycled to cool down in my nozzle that's afraid it might cause some issues so yeah mission accomplished we're done let me do a summary for this because that is gonna have to cool down now that we've finished this product I guess there's a few things we can write down here as tips the first and biggest tip is try to find a water bottle that is 0.2 millimeters or 0.3 millimeters at 0.1 millimeters the ribbon has to be 20 and it's not great it doesn't quite go into the computer very well tip number two is the filament that comes out the recycle filament it could be 1.6 millimeters and still print okay it doesn't have to be 0.75 the slide fact that prusa says the filament should be 1.75 millimeters tip number three when you're printing with the Recycled rpet use temperatures of 260 or above for every single layer not just the initial layer every single layer print and see 60 because that's the only temperature at which Durban actually melts tip number four is kind of a tip just for myself a lot of the pet that you're going to be printing with if it's recycled is not quite pure and they're going to leave little traces behind try to use a new nozzle if you can that's all I can say about it just because if you have a really good nozzle you might ruin it there were some times during this project but I was just kind of a little overwhelmed because being an amateur 3D printing Enthusiast I had tons of things I had to learn yeah it's been quite a project but now that it's over I'm pretty happy with the results and as the finale let's see how this fares So Pretty good overall this is definitely pet a lot of stringing as you can tell and now it removes itself just like any other print I've made antenna it works this turn into it and I think that's kind of neat [Music] [Music]

Channel: Vivacello

Views: 3,726

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Id: byTKO5HDwuU

Length: 32min 15sec (1935 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2023