First attempts at creating filament

Two days ago I had my first try at creating filament with the machine I bought second hand.

The previous owner included some PLA pellets, so I mixed it with some of my hand made pellets and gave it a try. I set it all up according to the very minimal documentation.

The plastic wire is supposed to come out, it moves close to the floor, there it touches a sensor that triggers the filament spool to wind up the wire. Simple enough.

First attempt

While the last used temperature was 170 degrees Celsius, the docs mentioned 210 for PLA. So I went with that. It went horrible. The filament that came out of the nozzle immediately stuck to the first thing it touched.

It often didn't even make it to that part. The 'filament' that came out was also super brittle. After about half an hour of mucking about, I gave up.

Second attempt

My assumption is that 210 degrees is too hot, so this time I went with 170. Besides the temperature I can also play with the speed of the extruder motor and the fan near the nozzle.

This went less horrible. It took about half an our, but eventually I was able to use the setup as it was intended.

The box in the picture shows that it took a while. But eventually it resulted in spool with filament.

Then quickly, the spool unwinded itself. Here are some of the better parts of filament from that attempt.

With my second attempt the pooling went much less chaotic, resulting in this spool.

The plan is to try again later and try to find the settings that provide the correct diameter. To make it figure that out, I'll be using my provided pellets first. And not mix in my own scrap PLA.

The filament I created today I can use in two ways. First, I'll be cutting out the best pieces and feed it to my 3D printer one by one. Just to test out the tolerance of my printer for different widths. The other parts, I can just cut into small pieces and use for a later attempt to create filament.