Open Source Ecology Lyman Filament Maker, 3 Oct 2017

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From YouTube: Introduction to Building the Lyman Filament Extruder

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See http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Lyman_Filament_Extruder

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Welcome everybody to the world of filament making, so this is Lyman film and extruder version 6. This is a construction manual by Hugh, Lyman, the so called inventor. There are no inventors there's people who only who innovate by the way. This is the extruder, how it looks so so, essentially, it's a plastic enclosure. There's the hopper filled with pellets, so whatever you're you're turning into film and the plastic filament comes down through this hopper here and goes into this heating element. The heating element is like this.

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This is a PID temperature controller which gets feedback from a thermistor inside the heat barrel. That's a heat element and the heat barrel, which is simply a half-inch pipe, and then it the only controls are how fast you're spinning the motor the motor is right in the back here.

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That's set through a knob I believe and the feedback comes from the nozzle, which is actually surrounded in welding blatt, surrounded in carbon-fiber welding, blanket to keep the heat in where it melts there just to make it more efficient I mean I think it would probably work without it, but the idea is that there, the the barrel is kept at a constant temperature, so either by setting the temperature or by both the combination of set temperature and the speed of the motor you're. Getting this filament, that's that's coming out.

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The nozzle here here has two configurations: one is one is hung on a wall. The second one is just horizontal, so we're gonna build the one. That's hanging on the wall and I talked to him. He says the wall. One is the one that he's using. It works better. So we start with a bunch of 3d printed parts so like with a little 3d printer that we built ourselves.

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We can print all these in one piece now what I did is I printed them on multiple pieces, because I was actually using the lols about mini to do that as we're upgrading all our D 3ds, okay, so so, basically the so. This is uh when you print it out of pieces. What you got to do is glue them together. That's the thing and that's what that's what's happening here, and these are of four sections. This would be around it's probably more than 12 inches across.

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That's why everyone puts it in pieces, but once again, once once we scale our printers will print on that in one piece. So this is the like this square here, that's that square structure squarish with it rounded corners and that's what happens here. There's a power supply, 24, volt power supply. There's a gear motor the power supply would be for the gear motor. The temperature controller would be where's the temperature controller I. Guess it's how it's shown there? Oh, yes, it's facing the other way.

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Yeah, so the screen is, on the other side, power supply to the to the motor temperature controller. Activates saw a stock, solid state relay that turns the the heat barrel on and off the heating element inside the barrel and the motor drives a simple auger, but it's a it's a 9/16 auger bit. This is what I've got both 9/16 and 5/8.

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5/8 I believe it's too big for a half inch pipe, so I think the 9/16 is the correct one: there's a heat band, a switch for for the heater yeah, so moving on what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna go through this whole manual, real quick, so everybody gets an appreciation for.

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What's what we all know about this so far and by the way we've open-sourced is fully I mean it's open source, but what we did was we we created if you go to Lima and a filament extruder on the osc, wiki you'll see the full CAD in freecad people. So this is what we have right now we can download the full CAD files in open format, so you can play with this. These are the actual files of the heat of the heat barrel and the extruder part, and the other part is the winder part.

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So moving on to the PDF here, construction manual here so going through, basically you're gluing up the parts, since this is in multiple parts, you're holding them together and you're brewing gluing, that with glue epoxy, crazy glue, I'm gonna try Krazy Glue, since that's fast-acting and we can be pretty effective. So we'll lay it up just like we're shown here and we're gonna basically try to replicate this.

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This is we've got all the components, and here the wiring I haven't studied the wiring in great detail, but maybe, as we go through this, we can, we can actually see what's going on. A lot of this will be obvious. Like turn the switch on and off other things like the PID there's a little instruction manual inside the box, we're going to read that and see which which connections are which so here's the gluing so main things motor auger, heater. Okay.

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So let's take a look at the heat barrel, this heat barrel is put onto one end of this. Of this, so this is the hopper here. Actually, the heat barrel goes on this side here through this four flange, it's a metal flange. And how do you? What do you do to the flange that flange is actually custom drilled using this template?

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That's 3d printed this quinion, so we're gonna drill that, through to mount it on a small MDF block, which I guess is an it's an insulator to keep the plastic from melting because the barrel is gonna, be hot. I'm gonna use the MDF too to keep everything cool. So we don't melt 5/8 drill bit here, I drill it out! Look at that!

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We are using a well, let's see, I'm, not sure if we're using 9/16, because I haven't read instructions but we're we can drill out the pipe and ream it out as much as we need to we put in a little bushing into the MDF block. The bit is gonna, be spinning inside that brass bushing. So here's how we assemble it basically screwing this half-inch pipe into this. This 1/2 inch flange and then on the other end, we have a 1/2 inch, pipe NPT, pipe coupler and then we've got so we've got.

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Let's see his is 0.60 diameter. That sounds to me like just about somewhere like 9/16, maybe okay, so here's how so here's that once again that hopper in more detail the auger bit has a hex shank, you put a bunch of washers and a thrust washer on it and you couple it to the motor here's, the the barrel side, the heat side, no problem I could see this. We can snap this out in a second, that's obvious. I do see a little hole in there which might be an air hole I.

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We have to look at that into more in more detail. Then start the shaft through you couple with a 3d printed coupler you couple to this this very strong motor. Now this motor is very, very strong, so we're hoping that our coupler, which I printed by the way, the hundred percent- typically you do 20% for light duty stuff.

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But since that's gonna carry all the force, we want to make sure that that's pretty tight and this is gonna, be the key perhaps than one of the critical challenges here, because the hex shank goes in here, that's good as far as the motor there's a key way in there. So we're gonna make sure that we have to set the shafts and basically couple them to each other as strongly as possible.

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And if that fails, we can go to other means, such as I mean we've used like rubber, very solid rubber, couplers other things, but we'll see what I mean. Hopefully this this part right here works for us. So that's the assembly full assembly with the the motor the barrel barrel, heat barrel at the end, and then the auger here, where the your chips of ABS plastic fall in thermistor now so so attach a temperature feedback system. Just like we did with the 3d printer, it's a little different type of a thermistor.

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Why we use this Kapton tape like we have and then the other trick is we have to drill out this cap? It's a half-inch brass cap brass, plug that we drill out I would imagine about a two two millimeter drill bit I know Hugh told me he does 1.25 millimeters or the 1.75 Philmont making. So four for this three-inch three millimeter filament we're gonna, probably start with a two inch to two millimeter drill bit to make it happen. So here you've got the thermistor.

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You've got the heat and around that now you've got the fan and that's how it goes and it's wrapped around with a heat blanket. He also uses a fan here: cool cool, the filament off as it's falling and in this case here that that fan holder is used in just as a guide, hole, I, guess I'm, not sure. So, in our case, we've got this cup this. This hopper element where we we put it onto the top of the box. You got some screws here.

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You attach all that together to the bottom part, which is the electronics part and here's spitting out some filaments. So so it all goes well in a few hours. We will have this happening, which would be very cool, yeah and now the next. The next is the filament winder side, which here shows the spool. So that's once again, a 3d printed, spool, it's driven by a little friction wheel against the rim and this rubber band. Here, that's not a drive, that's just to hold down to keep that keep the spool from falling out.

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There's a speed controller on this little DC motor drive in the spool and there's a speed controller on another element which, which is the wire feeder.

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What we call tensioner tension roller, which keeps the wire at a particular tension as the as the spool rolls it up so so there has to be a tight relationship between the speed of this motor here and the speed of this other motor I. Guess they got to be exactly right so that when you're pulling I think I think that's the way it works, I'm, not sure as it's pulling it's they're, both spinning at the same rate, which is actually when you think about it, it's impossible.

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So there must be some, maybe like this I'm speculating here, but I'm speculating that this roll here pulls slightly faster than this roll here. So if there's any slack slack does not build up, so this must spin just a little faster. Just my guess now. What is this element here? It's just a simple on/off switch. It's got to limit switches which have long long fingers on them. So if the so, basically it's it's a very simple on/off mechanism.

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When this thing, when the the spooler here stops, the filament here as it's being generated, falls down through this little guide, hole the elongated guide, hole and then it trips, this lever, which turns on this dpdt switch double pole, double throw switch which turns on both the spooler and the tensioner mechanism, so once it so it spools it and then after it, so it's a little faster than actual degeneration of the filament.

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So once it spools it enough, the the filament tends to rise up in the hole as it's getting pulled and it trips another switch, which then deactivates the spooler mechanism. So here's a detail of the tensioner: it's a little 5 volt 12, volt, 5, amp power supply to the to your speed controller here and here's your spooler controller, so I guess within the decent range because of this mechanism. Here we can.

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We can set the speeds accordingly, where the faster you set, the spooler, the more more times it'll be going up and down many more times, it'll be going up and down, as opposed to, if you wind, very, very slowly than it will in principle, if you, if you were to get it exactly right, it would stay right in the middle all the time, but that's gonna be impossible because there's no other feedback outside of on and off okay. So this is some cat and some proprietary software that we don't know what it is. Probably AutoCAD.

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And that's so more details, I mean top view here. So it's this is kind of transparent, but we did redid this completely within free CAD. So this is this one is interesting here. So this is what we're gonna. Do we have this neck, that's angled, so that you, you have an entrance going vertically up. So we have this piece 3d printed and we have this collar 3d printed and I love it. When a plan comes together, so here's a here's, the couplers motor, so motor gets attached with four bolts.

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The coupler gets attached right to the shaft, there's probably a set screw there. Then we got the auger and then some more screws tightened down. I, don't know what those screws are doing there to tell you the truth. The auger goes in the MDF block: oh yeah, okay, those, okay, sorry, those are the screws that go into the MDF block towards the outside to grab the the extruder barrel from the inside.

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That's what it looks like and it's probably because the bolt heads want it to be on the inside since the bolt heads as opposed to the thread and not take up less space, so a bail interferes much because you'd question. Well, why are you sticking the screws out to grab something from the inside? Well, that's my only guess why that would happen so more screws to screw this down to the base. The plastic base there's some more washers to keep things cool.

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Actually, these are I, think MDF washers to keep the screws from propagating too much heat nuts. The barrel coupler thermistor blanket for installation heat band plug there. You go next, so this is. This is actually the piece all the pieces that we have. These pieces I got in a black bag right behind me here. All these we print it out. We've got these two out just in just crazy glue, so we can do it. Here's this detail.

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We have all these pieces, so this this is the one that we're doing for the vertical position vertical hopper and what is that? Shipping? Okay, so he's using anteus a standard. Three and shipping which we had from our eight millimeter rods hotspur. So there we go, we didn't have to buy that since we bought it for the 3d printers for the eight millimeter rods. So this is how you basically glue this all together. It's a little jigsaw puzzle. Look at that! That's pretty nice, maybe with the the I guess sheet.

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Metal workbench within freecad could probably generate something like that. You guys anyone in freak it out. There can tell us, give us feedback so basically how you stick it together, all the parts details of parts. Okay, now this is gonna, be the crib thats good. This is good. We got some. If we can follow this, we can pretty much do the whole electronics. Do you read any of these diagrams like this or really yeah yeah? We could. We can probably yeah I mean this is pretty transparent. Here looks, looks pretty good looks like you know.

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We can probably make all these connections here without a problem. Heat band, yeah, yeah yeah, looks, looks pretty good, so this is gonna, be our main reference point as far as any things that are not transparent immediately from the way the things looks is because what I'd explained just before is pretty pretty much transparent. Let's see what is this? Is there a? This? Is a configuration full speed, 450, not our p.m.

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and is not variable, and the fan isn't on or off with the switch, and this configuration here is that the fan is on all the time and the motor rpm is variable. So in our case we have the variable motor rpm, because very we have a variable voltage regulator by the on the shooter's side, and this is as far as I know. That's we do have this variable voltage. We've got three of them total one here and then two more for the the winder side. So this is parts parts list. Oh you have more details.

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This is pretty nice and that's it. That's it people, so that's all the documentation that there is we'll generate some more documentation on the actual, the spooler part and we'll go from here. So we're building it starting this tonight. Thank you.