3d print directly with pelletized materials

Open Source Pellet Extruder

Universal Pellet Extruder brings pellet 3D printing close to people. Many 3D printer users are used to buy large rolls of filament, but how about ditching the rolls of filament for plastic pellets?! As always, RichRap wants to maintain his project as part of the open-source community. So, all of the files for his Universal Pellet Extruder can be found on Youmagine: https://www.youmagine.com/designs/universal-pellet-extruder-reprap-3d-printing

Printing with pellets offers many benefits:
– Currently, 3D printing filament is produced by melting down plastic pellets, extruding the melted plastic into a thin circular shape, and then rolling it up into spools. Using pellets, however, eliminates the need for further processing, and, therefore, makes them much cheaper.
– Fewer manufacturing steps also help to minimize the chance of material contamination, so prints will be more consistent.
– On top of all of this, plastic pellets are currently used in industrial injection molding machines, so there’s already a much wider selection of plastics available.

RichRap experimented with a few different sources for pellets, and even tried to reuse filament by cutting it up into tiny pieces. In the end, he found the easiest and best source to be pellets from ColorFabb.

In order to help make the extruder easy to build for Makers all around the world, RichRap kept the parts list fairly simple. The majority of the extruder is composed of 3D printed parts, and a reliable J-Head MK3 was used for the hotend. The pellets are fed into it by a modified 6mm wood auger bit, which is driven by the extruder’s stepper motor. Other than that, the only necessary parts are some M3 and M4 fittings, and standard 606 bearings.

Thanks to Richard Horne: http://richrap.com