Extrusionbot first print

The new Extrusionbot produced it's first filaments before Spring Break.  Works great but we made a mistake in our ratio of PLA to colorant beads.  Way too much colorant made the filament too soft for use in printing.  The drive gear that feeds the filament into the extruder nozzle on the printer just couldn't grab it well enough.

As you can tell from the images above, the blue filament has the normal "bite" marks on it from the printing process.  The blue was commercially purchased (Matter Hackers 1.75mm PLA).  The orange filament is our first attempt at extruding with the Extrusionbot and we apparently used way too much colorant (it was a 2 to 1 mixture of PLA to colorant).  This softened the filament to the point that it compressed too much during the print process and the teeth of the drive gear bit into the filament way too much.  It also left an excessive amount of residue on the drive gear.  The stuff just wouldn't extrude.

We got in touch with Extrusionbot and they confirmed what we suspected regarding colorant ratios.  As an aside, this will be a GREAT opportunity to enlist our Science department (Chemistry in particular).  The chemical make-up of filaments is critical to their performance, effect on print temperatures, ability of the material to feed into the print nozzle, adherence to build plates and so on.

So we altered our ratios to approximately 4 to 1 PLA to colorant and started extruding.  The filament came out at a consistent 1.75 to 1.8 mm which is what is expected.  Now for the real test...does it print?  Well, yes it does! 

A student designed and printed a lid for the hopper on the Extrusionbot since we are in a pretty dusty environment here in the woodshop.  It works great and we are incredibly happy that we were able to extrude and print with our own filament after such a short time working with the E-bot (the new name our kids have given their Extrusionbot).  We have to take into consideration the fact that we are working not with a simple melting of plastic and spitting out weed whacker line.  What is occurring on this new machine is a highly complex fabrication of 3D printer filament from scratch.  This is not an easy thing to do without the proper machine.  The Extrusionbot is a fantastic piece of technology that our students are going to be using and learning from for a very long time.