300px, right The Lyman filament extruder is a device for making
3-D printer filament suitable for use in
3-D printers 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''li ...
. 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 filament extruder for less than $250 in components that can take
ABS or
PLA
PLA may refer to:
Organizations Politics and military
* People's Liberation Army, the armed forces of China and of the ruling Chinese Communist Party
* People's Liberation Army (disambiguation)
** Irish National Liberation Army, formerly called ...
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 printing ...
, 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
"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
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
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. 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
