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Last week I started working on extruding ABS and PLA with the Filabot extruder (you can read about it here). For ABS this worked very well but for the PLA it was more difficult to get good results.

This week provided me with some new challenges.

Challenge 1: Switching the Filabot nozzle

To be able to extrude with the Leapfrog here at the office the nozzle needed to be changed to 1.75 mm. Turns out that this is super easy to do on the Filabot :slight_smile: Here’s how:

  • First make sure the Filabot is heated up to the melting temperature of the pellets that you were previously extruding. In my case I heated the Filabot to 140 degrees Celsius for PLA.
  • Then simply use an adjustable wrench to screw of the nozzle and to screw back on the new one. After turning on the extruder and waiting for a couple of minutes the PLA started extruding again smoothly.

pic filabot2.jpg
pic filabot2.jpg3120×4208 1.54 MB

Challenge 2: Extrude PLA at the right diameter

This didn’t turn out that well unfortunately. With a 1.75 mm diameter nozzle I wasn’t able to extrude the diameter at 1.75 mm. In fact the average filament diameter was about 1.30 mm. I tried extruding at 130, 140, 150 and 160 degrees each yielding similar diameter results.

So I’d really appreciate it if you guys can tell me why this is happening and how the diameter can be increased?

Next week: Extruding Polypropylene

Polypropylene or in short PP is one of the most common plastics used in a ton of different applications. So if it is possible to recycle this material at home and to reuse it for 3D printing that would be super interesting. As a start next week I will be extruding PP pellets that are normally used for stuffing stuffed animals to see what kind of PP filament can be made at home with a Filabot.

My expectation is that it won’t be easy, but heck, I’ll give it a try :wink:

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Nice, @bramhallo, I’m glad to see the project is coming together :slight_smile:

@Toby_Filabot, do you have any tips on how to increase the diameter of the extruded filament? Cheers

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Hi Bram,

With PLA you might need to use a larger nozzle. It sounds like the PLA is getting pulled from the extruder to much. A larger size nozzle would allow the filament to be pulled to the correct size.

On another note we have a spooler system that we are currently getting onboard and should have it available soon. This system can be dialed in to pull the filament from the extruder to the correct size and it also spools the filament.

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Hi Tyler,

Thanks for your recommendations! Do you know if there’s a place where we can find nozzles with different diameters? I saw that on the Filabot website undrilled nozzles are offered which we might be able to drill ourselves but if there are predrilled different sized nozzles this of course would be even more ideal.

Please let me know when you expect the spooler system to become available. Would be very eager to test that!

Thanks!

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