Filament Extrusion

We have purchased thousands of spools of filament over the past five years for our 3D printers. We have tried numerous different brands and types of materials only to come to one conclusion; we should have control over our filament. While there are many factors involved in producing our own materials, the positives outweighed the cost. Poor quality materials from outside vendors caused hours, even days, of manufacturing delay. Without a good quality material, nozzles would jam; colors would come out of the printer with different hues or bland saturation; certain settings needed to be adjusted. Sourcing our own materials allows us to make custom colors, different filament sizes (1.75mm and 2.85mm), and modify the material properties by adding polymer modifiers.

Filament extrusion is a very complicated endeavor. We use high quality resins from one the best American PLA manufactures in the world. After receiving the material we use (lost of weight) moisture analysis equipment in conjunction with desiccant dryers to monitor the resin’s moisture level prior to extrusion. Our master batch colorants are also made right here in the USA by a specialist in color master batching. All of our color hues are specified by us and are held to certain standards. We have a number of color matching filament which are meant to match products you can purchase. (This allow a 3D Printing enthusiast to seamless blend custom parts into their projects.) We also use very fine filtration screens in our extruder to filter our the smallest of particle contaminants. During extrusion process we monitor the filament’s size with a laser micrometer and no go gauges, so we can be assured of a compliant product that meets our high standards. We have also fine tuned our extrusion process with custom made tooling of our own design. Keeping the manufacture our dies and and other critical parts for the extruder in house, lets us control the quality of our tooling. We also have the capability to run different spool sizes, so if your run a lot of filament and you are tired of changing spools in the middle of a print, we can help. Just ask us about bulk filament spools.