“If I build this project today a build it diftently” please do it it’s so interesting 😁

So, you already have a lot of pellets laying around, why don't you build the extruder again and make a video about it. Filament + Content = W 🤣

12:08 "We only had enough budget to see the thing barely work." I think this describes a good chunk of industrial design.

I really love "failure" videos like this one. As a viewer it gives me a chance to learn a lot about the thought process that went into the thing, and in this case a reality check on the difficulty involved in building something that looks simple on the surface. I'm sure they're not as satisfying to make, but please take this as encouragement to make more in the future when the opportunity presents!

Building without money and knowledge, is actually what the entire maker-space is about. ... Leveling up yourself.

These are the holy grail for 3d printing. If someone can get one of these to the point where they are affordable and about as easy to use as, say, an Ender 3 we could see a major shift in the biggest problem in 3d printing... waste. Being able to recycle your waste into usable filament.... dream. We really need to see more development in this area.

I loved learning about this build! Thanks for sharing the process and your learnings along the way. What a great way to document this project before you say goodbye to it.

Thanks for showing it :) I’m sure this was a fun project to work on and to gain experience. It’s nice to see the overall progress on a project and the conclusions out of it.

The knowledge gained was priceless. Clever to monetize it, in this video, before tossing it. At the same time, your free sharing of this training is helpful for the next engineer so you have earned it. Well done!

I love it when people have the honesty to show their failures in videos. Not only does it break with this annoying social media convention of coming across as perfect, either making people distrust everything they see or making them feel bad because they believe they are so much worse at everything than the people whose videos they watch; imo it also is way more helpful for people who actually want to build a similar things. Explaining what didn't work or what went wrong is at least as important as seeing what did work for someone. It's also for people like me, pure hobbyists with no engineering background, super helpful in developing engineering skills; to see what kind of thinking went into your design process and what kind of mistakes you made when you were less professional than now spares us so much trial and error to do ourselves.

WOW, I can't believe since few days I am working on designing my own extruder, and then this video is uploaded, what a coincidence, it's surely gonna help a lot!!!

budget should not be an issue anymore, would it? i say: build it! ;P

Stepping through your problem solving process is brilliant and inspirational. Esp in 2013 and a $0 budget!

Would love to see another attempt at this. Clearly you've learned a lot since you first made it.

You totally have to try this again now Thomas! This wold make an awesome build series and I for one would love to see that!

Man, a useble home made filament extruder is everything that the DIY community wanted. Low cost materials, decent filaments e a huge step into recycling plastic!

I especially love the videos of yours that start with "How NOT to..."

"This is a video I didn't plan to make it, but you guys ask for it, so here we goes" moments later "the only reason I keep this here is because I wanted to make a video at some point and after this video, byebye" hahaha

Hai Tom, Been There Done That... Some considerations: * Big augur size best for recycling 3Dprints with schredder * I use recycled filament for very big 3Dprints to cut costs * A cheap DIY 3Dprint worm transmission with nema23 stepper works * Tube heater wire is to long to the hopper hence the clogging * Reduce temperature of the tube near the hopper with a large heatsink * Analoque Hall sensors works cheap and simple * Threaded rod and nuts through brackets on top of each module for a more robust construction Hope this helps finishing the project ;)

loved the video. im the person in charge of producing filament at work and i love it. this sure makes me appreciate my big extruder. btw at normal speed i produce 1kg/7minutes. at 0.02mm tolerance.

I so need my own filament extruder one day so I'm very grateful that you are researching this area.

just as im about to make my own diy extruder...thanks tom

Recycling your waste filament could also be a motivation, not only the price of the filament itself. It just makes me sad to throw away so much plastic from failed prints.

So many of these problems I had when I started making a filament extruder. I just redesigned it from scratch after my first one broke down, wished I saw this before I started that project

You're the perfect example that you don't need all the money in the world to create something. Even though it didn't really work out it's still an interesting project. Great Video as always keep it up.

This was awesome! What an ambitious project, would love to see more on this.

Very interesting, thanks for the post-mortem! Interesting that you were able to get usable filament out of it: other diy extruders I've heard of that used drill bits had metal crud in the filament. I think the other use case for a home extruder that people really want is for recycling support material and failed prints.

Love seeing the thought process and logic behind it. Most people would probably say why bother, but sometimes the whole point of doing something is doing something. That being said, with the price of filament where it is, I'm not really sure how practical something like this is for the average hobbyist. I wonder what the sales figures look like for the filastruder or other available filament extruders. You'd have to be someone who prints A LOT to make the cost and headache worth it.

I've been toying in my mind with the idea of making a filament extruder, so I'd loooove to see you making one

Enjoyed the video, part of doing something like that had to be frustrating yet satisfying because you designed it, built it, and used to make something else. How cool is that!

This was super interesting, this kind of design breakdown is something you do really well, please consider doing more open source design on your channel

I haven't seen the old video on this and I'm just watching this one but yes! Yes yes! This!! On ur previous video you teased that you might make this video and I'm really happy it came through 😁

nice. thanks for sharing the details. i always wanted to build a filament extruder myself... but it became more and more impractical as I dived deeper into the designs and the cost of producing your own filaments compared to purchasing ready-made.

If nothing else, it's a great example of progress. A great look at how far 3D printing has evolved in a few years.

More of this, i'm interested in learning more about this process and its good learning regardless.

I’d love to see Tom go after it again with an affordable budget. He said that these type of machines wouldn’t be useful, but imagine how good it would be for a MakerSpace with a lot of printer enthusiasts. I think Tom could pull it off “cheap” with his creativity

preciousplastic has some interesting tool projects to extrude recycled plastics of various types. Not really a filament extruder but that could also work. Super interesting to see the things you tried with this project, thanks for the video!

Both interesting and inspiring. Definitely the stuff that makers are made of.

Now a lot of people would like to see you build it again :D

There's one more thing to the "If I built it now" aspect: Technology has advanced by (as I write this) almost nine years. The geared stepper motor and driver with decent torque is now cheap enough to almost fit within the 2013 budget, sleeve heaters and PID controllers too, and you can actually buy proper augers with compress and mix zones. Would be interesting to see the 2022 version. . .

Thanks for sharing!!! i always say you learn more from your failures

Congrats on taking the plunge to build a Voron. Looking forward to the upcoming streams.

I could very much live with this turning into a project build channel 😉

It would be very nice to see a capable filament extruder build. I've been wanting to do one myself for a bit, I have two Ender 3s and plenty of scrap pla. I've been playing and learning arduino coding with an uno so looking forward to possible follow along. Thanks for the great videos.

Agree, with the price of filament it will probably not be a financial wonder, but as other also points out there is the waste aspect, not having to buy new filament and throw out prototypes would be great. Of course turning failed parts/prototypes into will require additional steps to break up the parts or maybe even a pellet extruder to make the material more uniform before going into the filament extruder. But... we have to start somewhere - and no matter the result, watching you designing and building a new "less budget" version (still mainly using commonly available parts) would be both interesting and educational..

Hi, i would be interested how to make the Sidewinder X1 V4 more safe...installing mosfet ect. Thanks.

how did you build the heating element? im making one of these on my own and for me that has been the most challenging part of the whole build

I think this is a fantastic end results of an engineering student. I look at the solutions and can see why you made those choices. I spend nine months to find a solution to extruding Zip Loc sandwich bag basically with zero back ground and less then a year out of college. All the plastic neck down occurs between the nozzle and the chilling means. My distance was near a half a foot. Yours is a few inches and not that obvious. The Zipper was cooled by a stream of water and the film by a drum. I agree that the drive approach was not good. I would consider using your lathe as the means of driving the screw because it should have a much bigger motor then the two you used and a speed setting system to get close to the speed range. You can make two steady rests to hold up the extrusion tube that later can be use for guiding rotating cylinders when cutting long shafts. Lathe motors should produce a uniform speed. To simplify the control assume that the speed, temperature zones and opening size from the hopper determines the extrusion rate. These do not change. They are gross setting to get smooth surface of plastic related to the temperature at the nozzle tip. The size in adjusted by the speed of the puller which has a short time constant. The delay is the length from where the hot plastic freezes to the diameter measuring rollers at the pulling speed. All the cross section reduction occurs between the nozzle and the freeze location. This looks like a length of a few inches.

Thanks for sharing your learnings!

I would love to see you building this today.

Cool video! I like this kind of project summary and lessons learned. :)

Very instructive, as always, Tom. :) What you say near 8:40-8:45 is interesting, about things being "a bit tricky for a third semester engineering student". ;) I remember my "old" first student years in IT and mechanics (it's 20 years from now), and that kind of challenge would have driven me to go beyond the student course scope (well, OK. I did). It's always very satisfying, whether it's a success or not (learning new things, you know).

Thanks for the video, very cool build!

Thanks for showing this extruder build. I read that NASA is making printers for their space programs. And its an all in one system, and it reuses all the food containers. And other plastic utensils. Grinds the plastic up, creates new filament for new prints. Such a great idea. That Filabot extruder sure looks nice. But its only 5 to 10 k. Thanks Thomas.

i love this idea of making your own filament :D

Boy this is gonna be great.

@MadeWithLayers I'm actually quite interested in the filament sensor you used with your extruder. I've seen the Infidel, but I actually need something to measure the filament diameter coming out of a Filabot and as you said, I don't want to put too much pressure on recently extruded filament. Do you still have any info, models, etc. on that particular sensor? I get the basic concept and can probably create something from scratch, but anything to start with would be helpful.

A couple things. I love that hoodie. Where did you get it? I've been looking at the EXO Extruder which doesn't use a water bath but 4 cooling fans. What are your thoughts on that type of system?

It would be interesting to revisit this project!! Maybe team up with cnc kitchen for it?

This was really interesting to see, thank you Tom!? 💜🧡💙

I don't want to make one because of the cost of buying filament. I want to re-use the plastic from some of the products I've purchased instead of putting them into recycling where, to be honest because of others not caring about the environment the whole load gets sent to landfill. I wish I could do something with the glass and metal to but one step at a time. So I'd love to see anything you have to say on the topic. Thanks for sharing your knowledge. It's greatly appreciated.

I would love to see you do it again, not Ro make new fillamment but to recycle scrap prints. I print a lot in pla an keep all scrap parts, to recycle them some day.

+1 for those who want you to try again, and do it right. Recycling printing waste (supports, wipe towers, failed prints, unneeded prototypes, etc.) is something that needs to be a lot more accessible than it is now. What we REALLY need is a Prusa-like kit so that high quality, but affordable machines, can get quickly into the public space. Most kits are woefully underpowered (Filastruder) or insanely overpriced (anything ready to run). The Lymans and Recyclebot designs are great, but building an extruder from a BOM and some wiring diagrams does not accessible make. I've been waiting to see Stefan's progress with his shredder and extruder for too long. :(

Yeah it would be awesome to see you build one that you're happy with

Hey I’m doing the same project and was wondering how you do your heating element. I been looking through and not sure what to purchase for it.

How much torque / speed did you need ?

I can already tell you're gonna build this again xD

Oh yes, experimenting with these kinds of setups... I'm wondering how Thomas from now will build something like this again...

Great Video ! Very entertaining, recognizing myself a Bit 😂😂😂

LOVE YOUR VIDS

Great project. I would love to see a working v2.

If this extruder is going away, please show us what would replace it, thanks!

While filament becomes cheaper and cheaper, we face a different issue now: Our printed parts are rarely recycleable since it lacks any kind of markings which exact plastic it is. So even if the quality is far below the bought stuff, as long as it can somehow handle shredded scraps, a DIY filament extruder could solve many of our issues. If you still have notes/design files etc you could put them on GitHub, so that others can fork the project to revive and enhance this actually quite promising design, that could result into something really cool. I really like the idea with the water bath to cool the filament down. Maybe adding a water cooling loop to the cold side of the extruder could solve the heatcreep issue. Since stainless steel is a rather bad heat conducter, that could actually work. As a software engineer I am always intrigued by the idea of getting cheaper hardware do the job by improving the intelligence inside the software. Since the speed of the filament should be known at the side of the pulling motor and the distance to the nozzle is fixed and we get a width value somewhere inbetween, shouldn't we be able to find or learn PID values to flatten the variation? One issue somewhere in the system, might throw it off, but with enough exception handling, it might just work.

From my point of view, the biggest advantage of a home-based filament extruder is waste, supports, and failed prototypes. Especially with rapid prototypes who cares about the color. I could imagine a workflow where rapid prototypes are continually recycled and are made mostly of recycled filament.

Great Video!

Precious Plastic has an open source plastic recycling designs including a filament extruder and a shredder.

I have some questions about the extrusion screw! You indicate that the optimal size is based on pellet size, and the optimal drive speed is then based on screw size. I'm not sure I understand this... The auger should fit in the barrel with just enough clearance to not risk binding, and I don't see how pellets will affect that. (Unless I'm wrong!) For drive rate, a larger screw would not need to turn as fast for a given amount of extruded filament, but as long as it's slow enough that all the pellets fully melt, it should not matter, right? Or is it more to do with the volume of the melt zone being larger for a higher diameter? (Due to surface area and volume scaling differently.) Alternatively, any links to relevant papers would be much appreciated! The only ones I can find are meant for industrial setups with very special tapered extrusion screws.

tom have you tried the petbot with bottle tape?

can you make a video showing a build doing this properly?

Great video Tom. Motters

this is a more impressive project than most engineering grads would be able to pull off!

Had all the same issues. Not enough power. Heat creep back to the hopper. Very difficult project on a tight budget. 😂

what engineering course did you take in university

With TEKNICs' Clear path motors you could find real control of your setup. It might be out of question price wise for hobbyists but would be more precise.

PLEASE do a 2.0 Version of this! Please!!!! Let's see what your newer skills and more years of experience can do for a project like this.

Is it feasible to recycle materials with a DIY extruder?

I love your content

Very helpful! I was trying to build my during 3 years... :) no success.. :)

Thanks for the video!

Thanks you Thomas!

can you do a v2 version just as a project. that would be great to see the project in 3 or 4 part episode.

I also wanted to try to make an extruder just for the recycling of vitreous material, but my budget for that is quite modest, so I'm looking for cheap solutions

You need to use parts from Injection Molding machines and plastic injection molds, There are small auger feed parts and simple plunger styles to feed plastic beads. The nozzle, would be made from hardened steel. For the Hot end (Barrel ) there are pyrometer controlled heater bands. What I see in your video is half of a injection molding machine.

I was waiting for this video. please share the arduino wiring diagram and program. I am on a similar project. Thanks and congratulations for the work.

A project perhaps a bit too ambitious for a student with a limited budget and time. That said... I'm a fan of this project. I don't necessarily think you failed. I think you didn't have the resources you needed. Anyway I like that you posted on the project. A good lesson on learning from failures and that's really how we learn sometimes. Keep up the good work and keep posting.

Hi please anybody here can share me a link where I can buy ABS like in the video

yaaay! you listened!

Great diy project. I think ppl in tbe comments ignoring the fact that it was built on a unuversity student budget. Super cool budget engineering.

I know that this video is quite old nowadays, but still very interesting! Thanks for sharing! Though, I'm wondering how did you make the heater system.. did you use some kind of wire to heat up the tube? Can you please clarify?

Please Thomas sell the machine on ebay or make a contest, I am sure some viewers will love having the machine even if it is not working at all. thanks because yes , your relics of 2013 are valuable