Does anyone here have experience with this? I’m on the verge of buying the Artme3D extruder kit as it seems to be complete with extruder and spooler. Alternatives like FelFil Evo will sell you the spooler for the same price as the extruder which in my opinion is a scam for something that isn’t that complicated.
The next challenge is filament degradation. Ideally you add some virgin plastic pellets to recycled plastic chunks so that there is enough plasticizer still left in there. Could you just add the plasticizer yourself? It commonly is glycerol or PEG which are pretty common and easily attainable chemicals. Does anyone here have experience with mixing additives yourself?
Filament extrusion is a difficult thing.
You need to keep in mind all sorts of things just to be able to get a consistent width.
Things like:
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Plastic material type (some can only be recycled so many times)
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A single spec of dust can clog your nozzle
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combined multiple materials will give inconsistencies
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if the plastic isn’t ultra mega dry, the water will form bubbles because of steam
Creating homemade filament is not for the ones that get frustrated easily, they are far away from the quality and user friendliness that modern 3D printers have. But it is a nice little project to keep you busy.
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If your goal is to recycle scrap prints and support, then you might wanna watch this first from Dr. D-Flo. He talks about several things, but incoming material variance is a huge deal. He can’t get consistent extrusion diameter (because inconsistent material pressure because inconsistent material size) without extruding coarse filament, then pelletizing, then extruding consistent filament.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=jXY1EygE4R8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
If your plan is to recycle old prints, you should try shredding what you have first. That way, you will realize it is ridiculously difficult without spending thousands.
Filament is so cheap these days, it’s really not worth making your own with 100% new material (+ colorant) and shredding old prints down to granule size is too difficult to be viable for low volume.
Good advice. I’ll do that first.
I can give this advice because this is where I’m stuck hah.
I have tried retrofitting paper shredders and blenders and not had much luck getting small, consistent shreds to use in my filastruder (which is also jammed and was always finicky).
Right. Yes I’ve considered making coarse filament in the first try as thick as the nozzle of the extruder allows and cutting that up into pellets. Those pellets can then be extruded into proper filament. It would mean two melt cycles per batch of filament so I’m considering adding small amounts of glycerol or PEG to the mix.
Is this to recover and recycle wasted filament?
Am assuming it’s for making filament out of pellets which can be purchased for significantly cheaper price. But the price of extruder alone makes this completely a pointless effort as you’d have to use more than 600kg of plastic to get event in terms of price difference.
Had the screw been bigger it could be used for recycling used plastic but at that point you’d need mill for plastic as well which adds to price.
How consistent does your feedstock have to be? If you’re using PLA and just want to not landfill your supports and brims and so forth, you can pulverize it in a blender from the discount store. You’ll wind up with all different granule sizes, though.
Edit: Actually, if you drill down into the description of the individual parts they do explicitly say it includes one high compression feed screw meant for reclaiming waste plastic. Obviously you still have to pulverize it somehow first. The other feed screw it comes with is for making filament out of pellets. So, both.
I don’t think buying all this equipment is better for the environment than just burying the scrap material in a landfill.
But it might be more fun.
Or more tedious 😀
Yes that is the intention.
The next challenge is filament degradation. Ideally you add some virgin plastic pellets to recycled plastic chunks so that there is enough plasticizer still left in there.
Depending on the filament material, it may be stronger than you think. Brothers Make did HDPE (which is not a common printer filament, I know) recycling 30x without serious degradation. https://youtube.com/watch?v=4v2avVAFFB8
IDK if that’s applicable to PLA, but it’s worth noting, IMO.
It isn’t applicable to PLA.
I believe PLA can only be recycled once before degrading.
And the test those Brothers did should be taken with a grain of salt. They took some shortcuts, so the result isn’t completely consistent with reality.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=4v2avVAFFB8
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I had not heard about this but have looked into a few other solutions over the years. Is the idea here that you manually wind it to a spool? If so, that part would suuuuuck. I have a pallette 3d (broken btw) and made manual spools and it’s super tedious.
If you do get it though post back about your experience.
This model has its own spooler that is automatic. It looks like once its properly tuned all you need to do is ensure there is enough filament shreds in the hopper.
Seems like a total waste. That buys a tremendous amount of filament. I don’t think even print farms do it. There are so many filament companies out there that the margins have to be razor thin.
Hmm. I’m not doing it for economical reasons but I’m concerned with wasting plastic. It’s more ecological combined with the interest in engineering.
I am inclined to agree with you, but I’m also super curious. It looks like you could get 25 KG of say PETG pellets for $1.80/kg and I suspect true bulk pricing would be even less. Add in additives, colors, the spool itself, etc and I would be surprised if a 1 kg spool has much over $5 in material in it. I have no idea how much other overhead like packaging, handling, shipping, adds to the cost. I have a friend that works in injection molding and niavelely it seems like it wouldn’t be too hard to enter the filament game.
Now add in the price of the machine and you will need a way to dry the pellets if you don’t use it immediately. I really want this to be a thing but I just don’t see it being economical… It might be fun however to make custom filaments.
@wordle unlimited Instead of Artme 3D, You can use Filastruder with a bigger price tag but offers a fully enclosed system and automated features.
