Sunday, October 28, 2007

Extruder Barrel


It occurred to me that, while I didn't have all the parts for an extruder head, I did have enough to assemble the barrel. That allowed me to do a proper temperature profile and get a nice closed-loop system put together. I ran the profiler and then opened the extruder exerciser screen.

I don't have any CAPA filament so I set the temperature to 140C. Holding the Teflon barrel with a pair of pliers, I pushed some HDPE filament through. Works reasonably well. A bit tough pushing the filament through by hand. Could be the barrel wasn't really 140C.

2 comments:

nophead said...

Hi Steve,
My experience with HDPE is that 140C is a bit low. My extruder tends to jam at anything less than 160C. Above that it makes little difference to the viscosity. It is always hard to push through manually, the pump can exert an enormous force, make sure your clamp is tight!

I have found that to make HDPE stick to previous layers that have cooled to room temp requires it to be extruded at 240C.

What is the end of the nozzle made from. It looks like a white acorn nut on the photo?

Steve DeGroof said...

Yeah, it appears to be one. I got it off the rrrf site. It was pre-drilled and the end was ground flat. I pretty much just had to screw it onto the heater barrel.