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Hi all,

The coming months I will be doing research on recycling plastic for re-use as filament here at 3D Hubs. I will post an update of my progress every week and hope to get a lot of input from the community since I expect to have many questions!

I will focus firstly on extruding and printing with different mixtures of recycled (old prints) and new pellets for ABS and PLA. After this I will work on doing the same research for Polypropylene (PP) one of the most common plastics but not yet widely used for 3D printing. If anybody has relevant experience with these topics please leave a comment below.

Week 1: Extruding ABS and PLA

Today I worked on extruding PLA and ABS. The extruder that I will use is a Filabot original and the PLA pellets are from @.

Pic Filabot.jpg
Pic Filabot.jpg3120×4208 1.78 MB

For PLA I found the optimal temperature to be around 140 C. Setting the extruder to a higher temperature caused the filament to stretch out after coming out of the extruder and setting the extruder to lower temperatures caused the filament to curl up after exiting the extruder.

For ABS I got the best results for temperatures between 170 C and 180 C although no clear optimum was apparent. What struck me is that extruding ABS produced much thicker and consistent filament than the PLA.

Questions that I wonder if you can help me answer are:

  • Why is the ABS filament more consistent and thicker than the PLA?
  • Do any of you have experience with extruding these materials and if so at what temperature do you usually extrude?

Any other tips and tricks are of course also more than welcome! More next week!

5 Likes
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Hope to see some great finding in the upcoming months! :wink:

P.S. You can see the box full of failed prints in the background ready to be recycled!

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Hi Bram,

To help answer some questions. ABS has a lower melt flow compared to PLA. This means when heated the ABS does not flow as easily as PLA. Hence the reason for PLA being a trickier plastic to make filament with.

When we make ABS we extrude around 170C to 180C, this will change due to the room temperature.

With PLA we extrude at about 160C to 180C, this also changes with room temperature.

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Thanks! Very usefull info! Will keep you updated on my progress.

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Hi! Where i can find your other post about the use of FILABOT, i have one of my own and been having difficulties usin PLA
Thank you!

My email: aida.avilac@gmail.com