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?
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.