More rolling my own..part 2

I've had some great results with my Filastruder and ABS pellets from CraigRK

The temperature and nozzle diameter are critical. With the standard nozzle supplied by Filastruder I got filament I was not happy with. It was brittle when extruded at 220C, and had a rough outer texture. Anything much below this suffered from too much die swell and I was getting filament of 3.2MM which jammed one of my extruders. I found this was the case with pellets from several sources, so this is obviously a result of the hardware.

Lower temperatures seemed to improve the filament quality, but there was a corresponding increase the die swell. I'm now running with a 2.5mm orifice on a filtered die. This was supplied at 1.75mm and drilled to 2.5mm, and with an extrusion temp. of 190C.

I found horizontal extrusion less than satisfactory with jams regularly occurring. I tried vertical extrusion but found that the hopper guides available on Thingiverse simply jammed after a few minutes extrusion.

So I got a hack saw to the vertical hopper feed, and hot aired the chute until I could screw in a cola bottle, and mounted the filastruder at 45 degrees:

This gave me reliable pellet feed and after a nights worth of extrusion I was presented with this:

About 0.8Kg of filament. It is of really good quality. Here is a 10x view under the microscope:

Nice and smooth. And it is not brittle. It turns white as it is bent around a small radius as you would expect HQ filament to do.

Here is one of my Lasertag parts printed wholly from home grown filament:

I'm now at the stage where my primary source of filament is myself. It's much cheaper! The only problem I have now is spooling it up, perhaps I should get a Filawinder.