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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
