I kept all leftovers and failed prints with hope to get or build one recycling and extruding solutions one day but checking just few days ago the those sold by the companies, not even a single one is worth the price or should I said within reasonable hobby budget if you're not printing on daily basis unfortunately. DIY is the way I will have to dig for info on. Hopefuly I will find something interesting and with reasonable price tags.
By the way, have you seen those? twitter.com/joshuartaylor/status/1408623749402927104?s=19 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-7jUVNTdU0XE.html
I would like to see Copper Fill mixed with Conductive PLA. Will the copper make it more conductive? Will diluting the Conductive PLA with the Copper Fill's binder make it less conductive? Perhaps the surfaces of the copper particles are oxidised and won't conduct at all?
How about the cheap biodegradable trash bags as they sometimes can be found super cheap and I think they are in the same plastic area as PLA... But not sure at all about that... but Yep could be fun to see if its possible to print with biodegradable trash bags as filament
This is sort of true. Guys aren't ALWAYS thinking about sex. Sometimes we get really focused on projects and optimizing every little parameter to enhance the final result.
imagine, it would be a great world, I cant even imagine how it could explode society if it were affordable, like everyone could be extruding their own filament so cheap that you could just make everything at home
'Every maker's dream.' Only makers who haven't tried it. If you have, you know it isn't even cost effective on time and materials, much less buying the machine..
@@ModelLights Do you realize that "dream" is something you wish to be possible not something that is possible? Thus for 3d-printing hobbyist who produces thus enough of the test / prototyping / failed prints affordable and working recycling system really might be a dream. Even more if he/she uses some higher quality/price filaments.
it's just a question of time, i found those greatly overpriced... what will be cool is to send back unused filament to a brand and they give you a discount on purchase.
@@youdig-detection Addnorth already does that. "Instead of waiting on local government to establish a supply chain for separating and collecting bioplastics and petro-based plastics, use RE-ADD! We collect waste and spools from users of our filaments and reuse it separate recycled product lines." I think that you get 10% discount and I think it's only in Sweden/nordic countries. It's a great idea tho.
@@magnetwhisperer apparently those are made for company that do prototyping on material , not maker like us ... but surely it would be great to have one for maker with a way lower price tag.
@@magnetwhisperer If the demand for these machines increases then the price will decrease, the problem is you cant increase the demand without reducing the price in the first place so it becomes a gamble, you have to have the capitol to purchase in bulk to reduce production costs then produce in bulk sell cheap in the hope you increase the demand to a much greater level than your initial production run.
I own one of these machines and I can say it is the best decision I made. I bought a pallet full of recycled PETG for under $300 and I've been making my own filament for almost year now and I still have around 60% of the pallet left to be used. There is a learning curve sense recycling petg into filament is not that easy but I've learn a lot and now, after 1 year, I'm making my best filament yet.
This is what I was thinking. Mix the recycled with virgin to make it more consistent. Even recycling glass, they only use a certain percentage of recycled to new.
I've thought about that too but I wonder how much reheating you can do with PLA and PETG before you degrade too much the plastic? does someone know how can I research about this?
You take the words out of my mouth. Pelletizing through a first low temp pass seems the obvious way to alleviate homogeneity issues. Amazing Stephan hasn’t tried it. 🤷♂️
@@CNCKitchen Are you measuring the power it uses? In the end recycling is cool, especially for shops that melt a lot of plastic into support material, but if it costs more than a new roll to remelt it... most shops are going to choose the landfill option.
Side note, the master batch manufacturers would likely send you sample sets of pigment/plastics if you contact them. They're trying to get new clients and sending out small batches for testing can be common. I know of a few plastic manufacturers that will give you a trash bag full of pellets if you show up at the factory.
The trash bag definitely makes sense, but I have a feeling they aren't too concerned about ol' Stefan here as a client considering he'd buy such small batches.
@@daveabittner yeah, but its probably not worth it to look up everyone you send a small bag to, the bag only costs less than 5€ probably, wich is less than a person who knows how and where to reserach brands and firms and stuff
You should re-extrude the recycled filament which is bad, by chopping it up with a simple machine. The output should look like the masterbatch, and should function basically like the pellets, which should give you similar extrusions like the new ones. I know it uses more electricity, but I would like to see how much of a change it can make to the filament quality!😁😁
@@CNCKitchen Wouldn't recycling filament over and over again, even if using virgin pellets compromise the strength of the print? It'd be interesting to test how filament strength degrades over time using a mix of spent coupons with used filament of the same type and colour.
I went on a course at this company last year. Their team is amazing. Their machines are amazing. Their facility is amazing. It is a super interesting process but you need a lot and I mean a lot of knowledge about plastics and other stuff because you've got a lot of different parameters and factors that come into play. We tried all day to extrude injection moulding grade polypropylene but the end result wasn't great. If we used 3d printing grade or a different kind of polypropylene we might've been successful. But anyway I had loads of fun and learned a lot.
Recycling failed prints/supports/raft/brims should be the future of 3D printing. Printers are getting more and more capable/accessible but we’re still stuck with tons of wasted plastic.
I also would like to suggest extruding PET plastic. I tried extruding it myself using Filastruder, but found it quite complicated due to viscosity not being high enough.
The first 6 minutes I slowly started thinking more and more "yeah... This thing's not gonna be affordable, is it" I then look at the link... And FML. Didn't expect it to be *that* expensive
This is me watching any maker/engineering yt video... While it's still nice to watch those videos it is also very frustrating to see that these youtubers get the top notch machines for free... I actually enjoyed that Stefan acknowledged that, sometimes I feel that makers don't see this problem at all - I probably wouldn't either and would just enjoy my machine...
My, what a blast from the past. Back in the late '70s, early '80s i was engineering support for a process that stretched glass tubing in a very similar way. We had the additional issue of pressurizing the draw to maintain the hollow tube aspect ratio. Obviously the temperatures were much higher, and at the time this was all analog. Also obviously the oven was much bigger and more expensive.
Once the Maker Space in Liechtenstein becomes reality I really hope that we will also have a setup for reycycling plastic and failed prints. At the moment I am recycling it at our local recycling center. At least we have one of these close by. Many makers don’t have, which is really a pity. Ending up in landfills is a no go. No matter what kind of garbage it is.
The fact that there’s not been a decent, affordable solution for hobby level filament production and recycling either shows how hard it is to get right, or how little interest there is for it. Although, I think interest is quite a lot higher than companies know. First to get it right will make a fortune.
I just want a way to use waste pla as support material. A dual extruder that can print the new stuff for the part, and the recycled stuff for support would be ideal.
You would need to build a whole extension like with python for that. In G-code support material is the same as normal print. It just differs in speed/amount of material. So basing on that you would need to make a parser that detects where the supports will be and offsets the print to the second extrusor. Do you see some other way to do that?
@@cambouiscom i may be outdated. I use Slic3r with Repeater and I couldn't find any option for that. What's the name of it? I want to see how it handles on the level of gcode
@@AntonySimkin the gcode uses two different extruders. The slicer creates gcode that tells extruder1 to create the part, and creates gcode that tells extruder2 to create supports. Not sure about main slic3r, but PrusaSlicer, which is essentially a slic3r fork has the settings under "multiple extruders" to print rafts/supports/skirts, infill, solid infill, perimeters, and support/raft interfaces with different extruders. If you had a theoretical printer with 5 extruders, you could print each of those with different extruders.
@@Crypt1cmyst1c Well this is actually awesome. I always used 1 extruder so Slic3r fullfilled all my needs. From what you explain, there is no problems at all to use recycled plastic of any type for supports. Even better... You can make supports from some kind of hard plastic like ABS so it doesn't stick well enough to PLA and detatches easier
I wish we could recycle resin 3D print material that way. Also, imagine how cool it would be if you could toss in some old plastic soda or water bottles and get 3D filament out the other end to print new things with. I know.. not possible, different types of material, but that would be pretty cool.
Future bulgars will not steal your money or diamonds, they take your recycling bin and all the 3d prints in your home because of the raw material prices 😉
The thing that excites me the most here is material mixing. I've seen a few companies develop an "ABS/PLA" mix, and supposedly it prints easy like PLA, just at a higher temp, and has a lot of the characteristics of ABS, so it's like a "win-win" type of plastic. Something like this would be cool to try things out. Maybe a PETG-ASA mix, or even mixing in glass fibre or something
Hope you try to make pallets from the shredded material by cutting up the inconsistent filament and then send it back thru for your final filament. I bet you could use an extruder to push the stage 1 filament into a rotating cutting wheel that kicks out pallets. Might not even need drying plus the first few meters of wasted plastic could be recycled almost instantly.
I feel like the demand isn't there, much like DIY inkjet cartridge reloader machines or diy paper producers/recyclers aren't a thing. It's waaaayyyy easier to just purchase filament than to go through the hassle of making your own. I mean, most people only print PLA (honestly, 95%+ of my printing is done in PLA), and when I can find PLA for $10-$12 a roll, why would I waste my time on one of these? I mean, at that price, just tossing failed prints and support material makes sense, and with PLA being a corn based product, it decomposes quite quickly, so it doesn have a huge environmental impact. Now, with that being said, despite the fact that PLA can be found super cheap, I still save all my failed prints and support material and all, so I have boxes waiting for the price of these extruder machines to reach a point where I can afford one. No really to make my own plastic, but because it's just another aspect to the hobby.
Calculating a ROI even at a way lower price is very hard for someone who might only print 10 to 20 spools per year though this might be viable for small businesses.
There's plenty of twin screw extruders and compounders, even lab sized ones on Alibaba and other China B2B websites. I don't really see the point of using a single screw extruder if you want to go for consistency, which any business would want. Once you start to go into any kind of mixing, e.g. recycling, composite materials etc then twin is really the way to go.
@@nathan1sixteen i disagree, as the 3D printing community is currently formed mainly by makers and tinkerers, who enjoy being able to do stuff for themselves. I for one would absolutely love experimenting, if not with different materials with colors, additives, ...
Can you make a video about clamping force degeneration of diffrent filaments? I figured out that PLA degenerates clamping force very fast and is therefor not a good material for compliant mechanisms.
Two tricks you could try out for the next video came to my mind: 1. To eleviate the issue of shredded material being moved inhomogenously by the screw, first make your own pellets out of old prints. Use them to then extrude the "final" filament for more consistency. 2. Instead of trying to make filament purely from shredded prints, you could try to add a certain (weight) percentage to virgin pellets, basically stretching the whole mixture like cocain and baking powder ;). No but jokes aside, this would offer an opportunity to reuse at least some old material, although I bet colours for example would be a bit off compared to only using virgin pellets and dye.
I do love your videos, they're so fun and intresting. Just hope you don't leave forgoten the DIY filament extruder project. ☺️ And thank you very much for sharing all the content you do.
In my opinion the best and biggest break through in 3D Printing would be reliable and affordable 3D Printers that you only feed directly with pellets and where the process of making spools would be skipped. This way even the environmental part of 3D printing would be much better. No more spools, no more throwing away near empty spool that don't have enough Filament for you parts and much better netto weight in shipping the pellets and ideally of course even allowing using old shredded parts. Really hope that this will become a thing in the next ~5 years or so.
never gonna happen. It takes extreme precision even compared to a 3d printer just to extrude pellets into filament. Theses 5,000 dollar machines can barely do it with evenly sized pellets and they use an optical feedback system to precisely measure the diameter. Never gonna fit something like that into a cheap 200-2000 dollar printer. Hard enough to get it coming out at an even rate let alone starting and stopping on a whim like a regular 3d print. The stringing you'd get would be impossible to stop and like he said, heating the material for too long degrades it. Your plastic will be even more brittle than glass by the time it gets extruded if it's not turned into dust first...' Just not physically possible to melt a small volume of plastic and have it extrude evenly while also being able to prevent over extrusion during air paths. Plastic is just not the material you'd use for a pellet extruder, you'd need something exotic that doesn't degrade with heat. Liquids would be a million times easier to work with, perhaps some kind of solvent to dissolve the plastics with a secondary solvent that instantly hardens it. a cross between fdm and resin printers but we'd need to learn a lot more about material science before something like that is possible, some kind of material that can be turned from liquid to solid and back to liquid on a whim and not degrade from melting like heating plastic. Plastic is just too hard to recycle and too nuanced, even with manufacturers stamping the material type on bottles it's still not economical. No way we'll get that for 3D printing, not when everything is decentralized and there are millions of filament producers that use their own custom blend of who knows what type of additives. The parts you'd typically recycle being small miniatures from millions of users who each have multiple different spools from multiple different companies. You'll break the bank just trying to sort through all that and have sub-par filament that's been reheated too much and it'll ruin so many prints if even a tiny fleck of abs or any different material slips in with your plastic. Just no market where anyone would pay for sub-par recycled material at 2x or even the same cost of a brand new, hinder free spool. All the companies that try inevitably go bankrupt. We shouldn't be wasting money trying to make some magical recycling device, it's better spent trying to move away from plastic into something more environmentally friendly or at least easier to recycle. Not a matter of technology to make it economically viable to recycle, it's up to improvements to material science.
keen for the second part of this. My first thought is can you add a step to turn the failed prints into pellets. Second is other people have mentioned mixing recycled and new material for better overall quality. I'd honestly love to be able to recycle failed prints/supports WHATEVER it takes because I doubt they are actually getting recycled at all otherwise (recycling is comparatively really bad in Australia, and I doubt they know what to do with random unlabelled plastic shapes)
one or two of these machines would probably be great for someone starting up a small commercial custom 3d print workshop; the Kinko's of 3d printing if you will.
Hi Stefan, Really interesting to see you using the 3devo extruder, I'm looking forward to the recycling episode next. Also it would be interesting to see how much wasted plastic / purged / flushed / contaminated you end up with by the end of the series. I think that is quite an important factor for these small batch production systems as it's then something you will need to dispose of or find a use for...
I'm really excited about the upcoming recycling video. would be really cool if you could try recycling not only failed prints but also other items made from PET and maybe even a mix of PET and PETG. And the cherry on top would be mixing in other materials, such as carbon or maybe cotton fibers. I'd love to know how that turns out. :)
Tip for using ground recycled prints, don't do 100% used material, use a mix of old+new material, this should help a lot with consistency Also would love to see if you could make DIY blends with this setup, PC/ABS/CF blends maybe?
I played with layer height and over extrusion to really aim for transparency. I was using red and yellow translucent and it is pretty impressive how nice it can be. I basically added extrusion on the first layer and internally until bad things happenned. Basically bulging. I also switched to a mirror print bed which really makes a beautiful bottom surface. Between that and prusa ironing... which I also tuned to fill the gaps the results we pretty good. As a mostly transparent item it was very good results.
Ich denke, dass das verarbeiten von geschredderten Prints alleine schwierig wird. Ich kenne in meinem Kunststoffverarbeitenden Kundenkreis kein einziges Unternehmen, das 100% geschreddertes verwendet. Es wird immer mit bestimmten Mengen frischem Material gemischt eben um eine homogenere Verarbeitung zu ermöglichen. Ich würde auch die Mischfarben nicht entsorgen sondern separat wickeln. Um sich irgendwelche Werkstattsachen zu drucken reichen die doch locker. 😉
@@CNCKitchen Mein Filamenthersteller (eher eine Manufaktur für Industrieware) hatte mal sein Interesse geäußert so eine auf einer Kompaktmaschiene extrudierte Spule durch sein Messgerät laufen zu lassen. Das musst eben nicht nur den Durchmesser sondern auch die Rundheit, die ja ebenso wichtig ist. ;-)
Since you got the coffee beans already lying around - coffee filament please :) I guess when you can mix wood powder in it coffee powder should also work. I'm really curious about the smell of the filament and and for how long it smells :)
3D-Fuel makes filament from coffee waste byproducts. I'm not sure how it would compare to directly using beans, but it smells pleasant while printing. The scent doesn't really stick around for long after the part is printed, but the color is really nice! It's sort of like a chocolate brown with dark flecks. As with wood PLA, 3D-Fuel's renewable filament is a bit stringier than average.
A lot of the suggestions here are great, and might work better, but the way PLA pellets become 3d printing spools is a nozzle followed by a “pulling wheel” and fans (to cool it). the same process might work for solvent extraction? CNC kitchen has a video on it
I wonder if you can find a way to turn the recycled prints from shredded bits into pellets of uniform size first before using them for making new filament. That'll make end results predictable.
@@Scott_C Hmm, Stefan should extrude it once from the scraps (mostly from those with as little virgin material as possible), then cut whatever quality filament comes out of first extrusion process into uniform "pellets" and finally use those pellets of same size for the final filament?
To help with recycled material you could extrude at large diameter and make a machine to get to pellets and redo to help make a more consistent final product.
What a nice compact machine. I made something like it back in 2014 with my old man, its a lot bigger though and kind of a rube goldberg machine compared to this device.
3D printing is becoming real-life Factorio, 20 years from now we'll be harvesting plants to feed to our biomass engines to make PLA pellets to make filament to 3D print more production.
It would be pretty cool to hook the filament extruder directly to a 3D printer, so that the pellets were made into filament and then immediately used in your printer.
You should try extruding CF/GF Nylon and report back the quality compared to commercial PA-CF filaments. If it's comparable at a fraction of the price, this can be incredibly valuable for people printing large strong parts. Also, see if you can get your hands on MIM pellets for powder metallurgy. FabMX in Munich is making an open source MIM pellet extruder, but if you can just extrude those into filament, it might be an even better option, and also a good alternative to the face-meltingly expensive BASF Ultrafuse 316L filament.
I don't think this is feasible for most people at home due to the investment price, but it would be awesome if some central locations (schools, makerspaces, libraries, city recycling centers) had these. You could throw bags with failed material and empty spools into sorted bins, and they could have a little shop where you could buy 2nd hand filament spools at a reduced price.
It's expensive but considering the high precision required it's realist. And I think that most maker's could only do two or three kg's of recycled material with their failed prints... Even if the machine was 10 times cheaper it remains way more expensive than buying a bunch of new spools I think this kind of machines are more suited for makerspaces, where lots of peoples can recycle their parts
If the machine and grinder and everything else you needed to take a failed print and turn it back into usable filament was under $1k I'd order it. I won't print enough to make it back, and the colors would be weird but I think at that price I'd be ok. The makerspace idea sounds good. Then the hardest part would be keeping the different materials separated and garbage out of the piles
To get better consistancy with your recycled filament, you could recycle your plastic into spools, then cut them up into pellets and re-recycle them into new spools.
OMG, this is really evolving fast. Anyway, a cost analytics of the recycling process would be great! Shredding takes energy, not to speak about drying, and then melting the material into filament after mixing it with raw PLA… is that worth the investment? Great content as always. A cuidar-se Stefan :D
Nice video, good work but... I have idea for another video for you, turn your old extruder into mixing mashine for two colours of filament, make it open source based on ender 3 :D
Another great video. But when it got the price of this machine my heart stopped for a few seconds. My 1997 Toyota cost $2000 when I bought it used fifteen years ago. Cars are my benchmark for "expensive items". (My car still runs perfectly with zero maintenance)
For your next recycling video, could you show off results of what happens if you were to do a 2-pass? First pass where you use the recycled failed prints, second pass where the filament made with them is cut down to more uniform sized pieces
Looking forward for recyćing failed prints. Or better, shred old prints and make filament again. We are team of designers, which devolop 3d models for community. Our last project is Fully 3d printable car, and we did 10+ prototypes. If there will be option to recycle them development process will be much cheaper
I would love to see a comparison of the different pellet types, how they affect filament extrusion/material properties, and a matching of different filament brands to the closest pellet extruded match. I have been trying to figure out material properties based on material brand for my job, and to some extent color additives, but it has been a nightmare. Having a way to classify filaments in some way would be a huge help as most TDS/SDS don't list the pla composition they are using or the pigments used. Or other filament types for that matter.
Cant wait to see what else you can do with this machine. It would be nice if you can do a recap at a later time going more into the details of the challenges of trying to make your own filaments with the various machines you have used and their pro's and con's. While possibly going into the challenges you might face actually getting virgin resin and masterbatch colors, as you mentioned buying what you got from Das can be a bit difficult for the normal person.
nice job Stefan try to mix in regrind at 20% and 79% with virgin resin with black masterbatch 1% it will work the regrind\ flakes at 100% will ingest air and bridge at the thought of the barrel causing a actual REAL extruder jam...and or inconsistency in extrusions
This might be too late, but before you start with the recycling of material, you should be very aware of the maintenance requirements of the machine. You may need to clean the screw often, especially after switching from one material to another. Recycled material can leave some carbon on the flights of the screw, purging compound can help with this by extending the time required in between screw and barrel cleanings. Also depending on the material, the material will also require drying. PETG is pretty notorious for bubbles when adding in "regrind" (recycled material).
Recycling filament I think is the next "killer app" of 3D printing... I think what that looks like in a pragmatic way is a combination of more dynamic printing systems (print heads and printers that can adapt to material in realtime) and of course access to filament extruders
These things look very cool and I'd love one - they're just INSANELY priced though. From 4850 Euro to 6350 Euro. What the hell. You can buy an Ultimaker S3 for that.
You probably need to do the same thing with recycled prints as you do with recycled aluminum. Extrude it into ingots (pellets), and then then use that for the final extrusion. Making an intermediate both homogenizes the material, and "cleans" it.
I wonder what will happen if you grind the scrap prints into a powder? I think that will take care of the inconsistent feeding problem, but will it clog the feeder?
I'm looking forward to the next video. Given that you mention that it's tricky to get consistent feeding, I wonder if it makes sense to turn the first filament into pellets of a more consistent size, before doing the final extrusion.
Pretty compact machine. Wondering about the two gears: doesn't the filament become a bit oval after passing through them? 3:47 video played in reverse 😁
Very helpful, thank you. I am really interested in recycling PLA Filament. Sadly, we can not mix other polymers. Mixing wrong polymers cause the wrong print.
One of our guys at the hackspace had a filament recycler not sure what he paid for it but we never managed to get the PLA shredded as well as Stefan, so never had much luck. Maybe a video on how you prepare the recycled prints?
Have you taken the machine apart? Curious to see how well it's made. Filament idea: expensive ones :-D Or interesting mix (like put some carbon nanotubes in your nylon)
see this could be nice for small business that print a lot using the same filament cause then there isnt as much waste if you are using the shredder as well but i suppose it depends on how well you can get it to work
That would be a really cool tool to use when trying to come up with a high strength PLA+ for 3-D printing firearms. And honestly for those of us in the United States who are already fairly deeply adjusted in firearms in general 5000 isn't really going to break the bank. Wonder is CTRL+Pew knows about this.
This is awesome! I can't wait to see how the recycling goes. And maybe you can also try to make some very special filaments like metal or wood filaments?
The thing about thermo plastics is that remelting them will degrade them for each time you do it (and it gets more degraded the longer it stays melted). Recycling plastics is usually not making them in to the same products, but used for products where there is less off a demand for performance of the plastic. It is not like aluminium where you can remelt it as many times as you want and you still have the same quality.
