As you can see it looks beautiful.
I measured its diameter in about 5-6 places and on the downside it's running 2.8 mm +/- 0.009 which works out to 0.11 inches. A diameter of 3 mm works out to 0.11811 inches.
The consistency of the filament is what Jim said it would be but the filament itself is 0.2 mm too thin. I'm guessing that somebody' vernier is set in inches and somebody set the filament winder wrong. I'm going to talk to Jim about this in the morning and see if that's all the problem is.
Vik tells me that the Mk II will happily eat filament ranging from 2.7-3.0 mm so this batch isn't wasted. Perhaps we can put an initialisation datum of the effective filament diameter in to the Mk II controller programme so that we can keep track of mass flow very accurately.
It's looking good though, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteThe good news is that I know for sure that I can run the Mk2a on 2.7-3.0mm filament without having to tweak anything at all. We should be OK. I'll put the Zaphod rig back together and await samples.
Vik :v)
It's USD$4/lb for a 20kg bag of pellets. Forrest said Jim Waring of New Image Plastics is offering us a production rate of US$3.75/lb for short production runs from 1 lb on up.
ReplyDeleteUS$8/lb (~$US17.50/kg) , not including shipping from Solvay to the filament processor, and shipping from the filament processor to your doorstep, I suppose.
Processing the stuff in the workshop is starting to look pretty attractive.
***Do we ahve a feel for the eventual cost of this stuff?***
ReplyDeleteThere are prices and prices. CAPA and extrusion costs run to about US8.00/lb (raw CAPA = $4.50)
As we go for bigger orders and production runs those costs will decline by about a third, I would guess.
The big cost is transport. When Walmart and Home Depot starts carrying CAPA filament we can expect very good prices.
As well, if we are able to go over to HDPE and polypropylene, you could see the basic price to be half of what we are getting.