In the plans of the current extrusion machine a basic drill is being used in the barrel to push and melt the plastic to the nozzle. This seems to work, however, in the industry a different type of screw is used which compresses the plastic while it’s melting. These are way less accessible than the drill, for obvious reasons. So Dave had the idea of possibly trying to produce these ourselves. Therefore this topic will be dedicated to the research on trying to design/model/produce this.

I was quickly doing some research on this yesterday and it seems to be a world on its own with different designs of screws, different compression ratios and different “zones”. If there’s anybody that might have some experience or knowledge on this that could help out, let us know here.

I turned the basic idea for the screw design into a quick 3D model, to see if I would be able to model it. Now I need to find the right design requirements to turn that into the eventual 3D model, so we can turn this into a physical prototype.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastics_extrusion#Screw_design