If you know that most soda bottles are made of PET plastic, you may have thought about how to use them to make filaments and have a steady stream of cheap printing materials. [Mr3DPrint] Say He has a way And shared some videos that seem very simple. We want to know whether the quality of the filament is comparable to commercial products, but assuming the video is accurate, the resulting filament seems to do the job.
The details are a bit rough, but it looks simple. The first step is to remove any dents from the bottle. He has demonstrated this many times, some use pressurized air in the bottle, some do not use it. However, in each case, the drill bit passed the bottle through the cap and then rotated on the flame until the surface was smooth.
After most of it was flattened, he cut off the bottom of the bottle and used the installed blade to cut the bottle into thin strips. The next fixture is the standard hot end with a 1.75 mm nozzle mounted horizontally. Let’s assume that he drilled a standard nozzle with a 1.75 mm hole, or considering the mold expansion, he might drill a smaller hole.
Presumably, the band produced by the razor is narrow enough to fit the top of the nozzle. He pushed the plastic through and tied it to the rope using a printer thermal breaker, and then a small machine pulled the rest through while winding it around the take-up spool.
Our guess is that the diameter of the filament is everywhere, and we want to know that placing the filament vertically or horizontally will get the best results. However, if you want to give it a try, this seems easy to piece together. In the comments, [Mr3DPrint] Some temperature ranges that can help you get started are mentioned, but we haven’t found any reference for machine design. On the other hand, they seem to be easy to build, especially if you have a 3D printer.
The extruders we have seen are much more complicated. However, most of them use particles.