We’ve seen a lot of homebrew filament extruders, but [Stefan] at CNC Kitchen shows off a commercial desktop filament extruder in his latest video, which you can see below. The 3DEVO extruder is pretty slick but at around $7,000-$8,000 we probably won’t rush out and buy one. We might, though, get some ideas from it for our next attempt to build something similar.
In concept, any machine that creates filament is pretty straightforward. Melt pellets and push them out of a nozzle. Cool the filament and wind it up. Easy, right? But, of course, the problems are all in the details. Die swell, for example, means you can’t just assume the nozzle’s hole size will give you the right size filament.
The 3DEVO machine apparently actually monitors the diameter of the filament and closes the control loop, changing parameters to keep the filament diameter reasonably constant and on target. Looks like it does a pretty good job, too.
[Stefan] is moving towards recycling old prints and we look forward to seeing that video. We’ve seen quite a few of these filament extruders of various levels of success. We’ve also seen some lessons on how to not build one.
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