300px, right The Lyman filament extruder is a device for making
3D printing filament suitable for use in
3-D printers like the
RepRap
RepRap (a contraction of ''replicating rapid prototyper'') is a project to develop low-cost 3D printers that can print most of their own components. As open designs, all of the designs produced by the project are released under a free software l ...
. It is named after its developer
Hugh Lyman and was the winner of the Desktop Factory Competition.
The goal in the competition was to build an
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...
filament extruder for less than $250 in components that can take
ABS or
PLA resin pellets, mix them with
colorant
A colourant/colour additive (British spelling) or colorant/color additive (American spelling) is a substance that is added or applied in order to change the colour of a material or surface. Colourants can be used for many purposes including printin ...
, and extrude enough 1.75 mm diameter ± 0.05 mm filament that can be wrapped on a 1 kg spool. The machine must use the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (
CC BY-SA 3.0) license.
The use of
DIY filament extruders like the Lyman can significantly reduce the cost of printing with
3-D printers.
[Christian Baechler, Matthew DeVuono, and Joshua M. Pearce, ]
Distributed Recycling of Waste Polymer into RepRap Feedstock
''Rapid Prototyping Journal,'' 19(2), pp. 118-125 (2013)
open access
/ref> The Lyman filament extruder was designed to handle pellets, but can also be used to make filament from other sources of plastic such as post-consumer waste like other RecycleBots. Producing plastic filament from recycled plastic has a significant positive environmental impact.[M. Kreiger, G. C. Anzalone, M. L. Mulder, A. Glover and J. M Pearce (2013). Distributed Recycling of Post-Consumer Plastic Waste in Rural Areas. MRS Online Proceedings Library, 1492]
mrsf12-1492-g04-06
doi:10.1557/opl.2013.258
open access
ife-cycle analysis
References
{{reflist
Plastic recycling
Fused filament fabrication
Open-source hardware