300px, right The Lyman filament extruder is a device for making

3-D printer 3D printing or additive manufacturing is the construction of a three-dimensional object from a CAD model or a digital 3D model. It can be done in a variety of processes in which material is deposited, joined or solidified under computer c ...

filament suitable for use in

3-D printers 3D printing or additive manufacturing is the construction of a three-dimensional object from a CAD model or a digital 3D model. It can be done in a variety of processes in which material is deposited, joined or solidified under computer c ...

like the

RepRap The RepRap project started in England in 2005 as a University of Bath initiative to develop a low-cost 3D printer that can print most of its own components, but it is now made up of hundreds of collaborators worldwide. RepRap is short for rep''lic ...

. It is named after its developer

Hugh Lyman Hugh may refer to: * Hugh (given name) Noblemen and clergy French * Hugh the Great (died 956), Duke of the Franks * Hugh Magnus of France (1007–1025), co-King of France under his father, Robert II * Hugh, Duke of Alsace (died 895), modern-d ...

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 the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

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 printi ...

, 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 A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work".A "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

) license. The use of

DIY "Do it yourself" ("DIY") is the method of building, modifying, or repairing things by oneself without the direct aid of professionals or certified experts. Academic research has described DIY as behaviors where "individuals use raw and sem ...

filament extruders like the Lyman can significantly reduce the cost of printing with

.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 Post-consumer waste is a waste type produced by the end consumer of a material stream; that is, where the waste-producing use did not involve the production of another product. The terms of pre-consumer and post-consumer recycled materials are ...

like other

RecycleBots A recyclebot (or RecycleBot) is an open-source hardware device for Plastic recycling, converting waste plastic into filament for open-source 3D printers like the RepRap. Making DIY 3D printer filament at home is both less costly and better for th ...

. 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