Malcolm Langille made this tutorial on how to make cheap filament for your 3d drawing pen like 3Doodler, 3DSimo, Yaya, SwissPen or others. It basically straightens the curled filament with heat gun.
From video description:
I have been thinking about buying the 3Doodler for a while now. The price of the filament was my only concern. So I decided that trying to make my own was the only option. This is how I made my own.
Cut a piece of filament from a spool. It doesn't seem to matter how long as long as you can get it taught enough. Tape both ends down to a table. Use a heat gun to evenly heat up the filament. Initially the filament will curl. Continue to heat it until it totally relaxes. Wait for it to cool. Snip the ends off with wire cutters and enjoy :)
Polypropylene (PP) filament is semi-crystalline thermoplastics which is produced according to US FDA regulations and the relevant EU standards. Basically, it is made so you can print plates, cups, beakers, food containers, spoons and other food serving utensils. This filament can be used with all printers that have a 3mm hotend and it comes in black color (very appetizing color). 2,1kg spool is priced at 99,95 euro and the 750g spool is priced at 54,95 euro. Now, maybe the material itself is food safe, however, when you push it trough the hot extruder and deposit it two food un-safe things could happen:
The 3d printed object could have small (micro) pores where bacteria could develop and get into your food
You could get some heavy metals residue from your brass hot end.
The topic of food safety and 3d printed thermoplastics should be researched further, I don't think that we will see much 3d printing for everyday food containers on regular basis. Probably the most people will use it as novelty gimmicky thing.
Still, it is good to see that food related filament technology is advancing.
Here is a collection of filament diameter (width) sensors for your 3d printer which will enable you to compensate for variations in filament and get better print quality. You can make them with some basic electronics skills.
Thomas Sanladerer designed, printed and tested this filament diameter sensor. It could be used on filament making extruders as a control sensor, or in 3d printers to get better printout results. The work on it is in progress, further accuracy improvements are needed but the current results look promising.
This is a proof-of-concept filament diameter sensor, currently intended for an extruder making filament. The filament centerline is 90mm above the mounting surface. It picks up the filament's diameter between two bearings, amplifies it via the lever by a factor of 3.6, which moves a magnet in front of the hall sensor. The hall sensor's depth is adjustable and is locked into place via the M3 bolt. Bend the hall sensor's leads 90° to the back and place the sensor in recessed spot. Lead the wires out to the front.
The 6x2mm magnet goes into the matching hole in the lever. The second hole intended for a ballpen spring, which is not needed in most use cases. For testing, upload the included sketch to an Arduino, connect the hall sensor to 5V, ground and hook the signal pin up to A1 on the Arduino. Connect via serial at 115200 baud, it will start spitting out two values each line, the first one is the smoothed ADC value, the second one the calculated diameter.
To calibrate, insert a test object with the maximum diameter you want to measure between the bearings and move the hall sensor carriage until the ADC value just reaches a maximum. Lock the carriage in place and use that value along with the diameter of the object as the last entry in the Arduino's lookup table. Insert two (or more, if you increased NUMTEMPS) more objects of varying sizes (for example the shafts of drill bits) and fill out the lookup table. Use the idle position without anything inserted for the zero-diameter position.
Support might be required for the files as they contain 30° overhangs. If you use Slic3r, you're better off with no support material.
Here is a different project which is more heavily developed and has extensive video tutorial: the Filament Width Sensor by flipper for Lyman extruder or stand-alone applications with a voltmeter
Width sensor project description:
The idea is that with a real-time width measurement the 3D printer could compensate the extruded flow for changes in filament width. Also if there is variation between spools of filament, there is no need to calibrate for that when slicing. The g-code is independent of the filament diameter.
For filament extruders, the measured width can be used as feedback in the extrusion process.This version includes a custom designed pc board as well as a housing. A version of Marlin is modified to use the sensor data.
The sensor outputs a voltage in milimeters (3v=3mm) that is shown on the voltmeter. I made some changes to Marlin to read the filament diameter real-time and compensate the extrusion rate. Code uses a buffer to manage the transit delay between the sensor measurement and the nozzle.
All the files, code and instructions can be found at:
There is a version of a diameter sensor based on hacked digital calipers developed by Wei-Hsiung Huang. It has several issues related to digital caliper precision and internal workings but it is a good learning project with some usefulness.
You can find all the instructions, code and build guide at:
New 3d printing filament family by Kai Parthy the PORO-LAY. The new filament family consists of four different filaments: LAY-FELT, LAY-TEKKKS, LAY-FOMM and GEL-LAY with different properties.
From description:
PORO-LAY line (4 filaments) dedicated for:
LAY-FELT • 3d-membranes • filters • semipermeables • future cloth • artificial paper soft and stiff fibres possible note: the filament contain no microfibres !!!
3D Printing Providence leader Matt Stultz gives the lowdown on a variety of some of the new and exciting advanced 3D printing materials and their uses. The range of filaments covered includes: thermochromic, conductive, Laywood, Laybrick, HIPS, nylon, and TGlass.
Extruding natural ABS at 18"/min. The guide limit on the left isn't quite far enough to the edge. The loop seems fairly unstable seen at high speed, but the tolerance was still within .05mm. I fixed the loop near the end by keeping the filament from getting pushed back past the nozzle. As long as the filament leaves the nozzle at a constant angle for the time it takes to get from the extruder to the winder, the shape of the loop will stay consistent for the rest of the job.
Russ presents his new home project: he made his own filament extruder. It is still work in progress but it looks good. Almost all parts are recycled from other machines.
There are more filaments from various materials available for 3d printing then just simple PLA and ABS. Here are some links on news related to filaments ...
Excellent roundup post by NothingLabs on various filaments, how to print with them and their properties:
Today, taulman3D has released another high strength material. One for those users that print mostly with PLA or lower temperature 3D Printers. This new material is called “t-glase” (tee glass) short for tough glass. As a side note, t-glase was actually released to our local testers as “taulman 810”, however, it soon became known among our local testers and a few industrial customers as t-glase, so we kept that title. Like 618, t-glase started with requests from you, the 3D Printing community. We initially released 618 in 3mm and things moved along very well. When we released 618 in 1.75mm a month later, we started to receive emails from users around the world that were using PLA and/or printing at lower temperatures. With an understanding of our processes, it was actually our chemists that came back to us and suggested we try a polymer known as PETT and introduced us to one of the world’s largest mfg of PETT components for industry. While printing in various types of PET isn’t new, we decided to work with the strongest of the PETT polymer combinations available. Most of us have seen a similar polymer in the form of clear high strength water transport containers. These are known to be extremely tough and resistant to breakage. Then the chemical company and manufacturer worked together to make us some evaluation line. With a few industrial customers along with some local operators, t-glase quickly went into testing. Within just 15 days, we gave away free for testing or sold the entire 124kg of available t-glase. Our goal now is to open t-glase for pre-sale to the 3D Printing Community.
The main features of t-glase Strength - First, as it’s a taulman3D industrial line, it has to be strong and we, along with our local testers and some selected industrial testers, are very pleased with the strength of t-glase. Especially with the larger nozzles used on industrial units. Temperature - Optimum temperature is about 212c to 224C, but will print down to 207C and up to about 235C. FDA approved – t-glase is specifically made of FDA approved polymers for direct food contact/containers. This includes cups and other liquid storage parts as well as utensils. Environmental - While t-glase is not biodegradable like PLA, it is a material that’s considered 100% reclaimable. Thus the new “struders” that convert failed prints back to usable line work perfectly with t-glase. If you have a “struder”, you can actually mix in 12% of the total weight in discarded clear water bottles. Clarity – like 645 nylon, t-glase’s clarity supports industry’s requirements for non-destructive evaluation of 3D Printed parts. Shrinkage - Very low shrinkage makes printing large flat surfaces a breeze. And it easily prints to acrylic, glass, Kapton and other platforms. Bridging - Those of us that have printed with acrylics and polycarbonates are always envious of their bridging capabilities due to glass temperature. And the new t-glase is very impressive at bridging. Fumes - Unlike some lines, there are no odors or fumes when 3D Printing with t-glase.
t-glass will come in “clear” as clear is a natural color for this polymer. We will begin to offer t-glass in colors around the end of the year. I’m sure most of you are familiar with RichRap, i.e. Richard Horne as one of the reprap communities leaders in color. Richard released an excellent piece on color dying the taulman nylons and with the release of t-glase, Richard has signed on to be our color expert. He will provide direction on an initial color set and applicable pigments. In that t-glass is so clear, we expect Richard will continue to impress us all with his color touch. t-glase is very strong, yet different from our nylons as it’s stiff, like PLA and ABS. And based on our first industrial trials, meets all the requirements for the three industrial customers that had an applicable need. To these customers, the clarity was a significant advantage for their quality control departments.
New advancement in 3d printing filament. This filament has wood added in it and has some interesting aesthetic and technical properties.
LAYWOO-3D is a printable wood for reprap 3D-printers (that lay down layers of molten material) This new filament allows to print wood polymer composite (wpc) objects with annual rings - and that without warp ! features: - zero warp - rough or smooth surface possible during one print - paintable-able, grindable - printable tree-rings - print temp: from 185°C bright to 230°C dark appearence, stics well on print bed, no heated bed necessary