reusing spools is really smart and hobbyists will be happy to eliminate spool waste. A lot of people that run home 3d printers are conscious of their plastic waste and recycle their own spools already. Have you found any difficulties with reusing cardboard spools specifically due to wear on the spool?
Kudos for reusing spools. I see how you'd consider it to be a branding problem, but I think it's a much larger marketing win for reducing waste. I don't demand recycling or reuse when it doesn't make economic sense, but even at our small scale, I hate throwing the empty spools into the landfill. What a waste. It's great that you're reusing spools and it makes me significantly more interested in buying Tangled filament. BTW - Tangled is an awful name for a filament company. 😀
I'd much rather there be tangled filament master spools that I can receive refills for, that seems like a much simpler and easier solution to reduce costs.
Great to hear your thoughts. I assign your design vids to students. Friendly feedback: the opinion and news vids run 20+ minutes for 5 minutes of content. You literally said 4 times why you can't pay to buy back spools. The first time made perfect sense. We got it. You repeated the idea that the re-use promotes others brands. Good point; got it the first time. Presenting 5 minutes of ideas in 5 minutes respects your time and mine; 5 minutes I can fit in at any point in the day. Presenting 5 minutes of ideas 4 times in 20 minutes implies I can't understand the idea after the first 3 times. I have to think ahead if I'm going to do a 20 minute task in a day. Thanks for doing them, looking forward to many more.
I love your Minimal Viable Product approach to testing videos. I've made some suggestions for improving the testing that will hopefully be taken in the constructive manner in which they were intended. By my estimation, the testing videos are significantly better than minimally viable or "better than nothing". Informing engineering understanding based on experience is very important and we don't need rigorous testing and extremely accurate data for that.
An info for all European 3d printing friends: 'Recycling Fabrik' accepts used filament from Europe and spools from Germany. I'm not affiliated to them, I just like the idea of recycling that stuff. Btw I really like the insights you give in your videos and they already gave me some really helpful tips on how to optimize my (hobbyist) 3d printing!
One thing to keep in mind with the branded spools as second use is that you are only providing a limited resource, so if someone either is unable to find the color or material they need, having a spool from you with another brand on it, lets them know where else the end user may want to look for materials they can't source from you. You're not going to be selling Overture filament. But letting people know that they are a quality product means that you're helping your sources as well, not just taking sales away from them.
The filament industry and 3D printer industry should have long ago standardized on some method to sell filament without the significant cost of spools which are then thrown in the landfill. This is far from an insurmountable problem. We should be eliminating spools and not trying to find minimally viable methods of recycling spools.
Thinking about spool reuse, you had a previous video talking about making spools. If you could make spools that collapsed flat when empty, then shipping back a dozen empty spools could be very inexpensive.
I applaud you for reusing spools. One of the 3 "R"s of recycling, after all, is "Reuse". I think it actually adds to your brand image that you are so blatantly reusing what would otherwise be waste. For some of your customers who track (or error correct OctoPart filament usage) their filament by weighing partial spools when taking off the printer for a filament change (like I do), it would really be nice if you added to your label the tare weight of the empty spool. I've recently seen a tare weight on a spool of filament in my collection, but I don't recall which manufacturer off the top of my head. I don't know when you print the labels for your spools. If you are able to work in a workflow where the label is printed on the filament line after spooling to be attached to the finished spool as it is being taken off of the filament line, you can potentially include a few value added pieces of information for the customer. 1- The empty spool tare weight (I would hope your filament lines have a load cell on the spool spindle for process control). 2- Actual weight of filament on the spool (from all the manufactures that I've seen, it's never exactly 1 kilo, usually up to 50g more than a kilo). 3- Actual length in meters on the spool. 4- Any other metrics recorded during the spooling process like actual tolerance of the filament diameter, actual ovality, etc. i.e. Things that you (should be) monitoring for product consistency. Having that info (as long as it isn't proprietary) on the label of the spool would not only be helpful for your filament customers, but demonstrate your own quality standards.
Have you guys investigated the economics/logistics of setting up a "premium" spool to be sold to a user in the 3-5kg range that is kept at the end user, and then only producing vacuum packed refills for the spool? The problem is while everyone likes the idea of reusing the spools, the energy, logistics and cost to ship them, clean/prep them and then reuse them is often higher than just making new spools. Refills dont work great in the 1kg range, but at larger sizes it might be more viable.
As for spool donations, could you publish the size(s) that you can work with? Width, Height, and Hub/Hole dimensions? The same Brand can have different size 1 KG spools. I’ve got some. Thanks.
I print all PLA at 225C and 65C bed. Never issues. Higher temp helps in strength, with PLA upto about 250-260C is good but i find that 225C is a good mix of strength and print quality. At about 235-240C you start to loose print quality. I do almost everything in PLA, even in places people think PLA will never work, it tends to work. Especially once annealed. Surface annealing is very very easy and will not change dimensions much.
One bigger issue you might run into with 2nd hand spools is Trademark law. You're re-selling a product (the spool) with trademarks (the branding) in an altered form (new filament). First Sale doctrine would protect you if it was just the spool. But putting some different filament on it MIGHT leave you open for a trademark lawsuit. You're not trying to deceive anyone, so your customers won't care. But the companies with logos on those spools might.
Speaking of spools. Have you considered selling unspooled filament? I currently reuse my old spools this way when I can. Being able to buy say 5kg or 10kg chunks of raw filament would be useful as I can respool to whatever size I want. I guess most people can't respool filament themselves though.
I have a metric ton of cardboard 1K spools. They are all in excellent condition and I am more than willing to send them but want to make sure you will use cardboard spools? Like I said they are in perfect condition.
I've been messing around with 3D printing for about a year. I just stumbled onto your channel and have watched several videos so far. Forgive me if this was mentioned anywhere, but have you looked into getting used spools from MIG welding wire? When I worked as a welder, personally I would go through 3-5 10 pound spools a day. I'd almost guarantee there are a lot more used welding wire spools created in any given city or town than filament spools. Someday that will likely change, but as of right now that is the reality. I bet within 10 miles of your facility there are 10s of thousands of welding wire spools sitting in garbages at weld shops just waiting to be reused.
A few videos ago, I recall you specifically saying that your PLA needs about 10C higher at the nozzle. Probably why there's confusion now. (I print at 220 already) @Slant 3D
I am just an amateur and don't go through that much filament, but I got into 3D printing to save money and reduce waste. I would go out of my way and maybe pay more per kg if there was an empty roll exchange program. May be poor branding, but it's great marketing.
Have been loving the updates. Even though in the UK it's not really economical to buy your filament I like the testing videos. For a more scientific slant the tech ingredients channel has a great approach. Maybe that would help your development for your chosen topics though in your case with your own input and experience with printing and fdm 😊
Feedback on the Time-codes/Topics in the description: >> 18:21 is duplicated (Completely Unscientific Testing Videos). Relabeling and reusing spools is NOT a branding mistake. If a customer were to peak under the relabel, they could spot a brand, but what filament spool brand will vary greatly between customers and tangled shipments. Only info is a given brand of filament was used for a few spools at some point. Worst case, a customer learns of a brand they may not be aware of, and this is good for the industry. The bigger branding issue would be when a list of "reusable spools" is created and shared. This is likely to generate more gossip compared to relabeling a random reused spool. ;) Spool Re-use is a real smart idea to run as a side experiment to test what's doable, and share details. Potential is it will lower barriers and open minds across the industry. It's good PR and good branding. :)
I would not consider the BBM as a BBM because the reuse of spools ties in with the logical benefit central to 3D printing of only producing what will be used.
I’d love a place to send my inland/voxel spools. I try and always by the spooless but Microcenter doesn’t always have it in stock. In all honesty I think you are about to have enough 1kg spools than you know what to with!!
For me, re-using spools is a positive thing you're doing! I would love to see you do the banded re-fill spool-less like a few companies have done. I'd be fine having 10+ reusable spools even if I have to print them, or maybe could get them from a print farm as an add-on item with filament order... what company would you use though 🤔?
Thank you for all the great content. I always learn a lot from your videos. Please skip the spools and only sell refills like bambu. Cuts the cost and weight of spools and does not comes with a reused brand. Provide a stl for a printable and reusable spool to use with your refill-spools. Personally I only purchase refills if available to avoid more spools.
I know of only one other brand who reuses spools but they request it not have any branding on it for returns. They offer stls for the extange. Im still intrigued with tangled but ill stock up when i run out of my wall.
Thingiverse would likely be a great candidate for api print ordering as the support external api in their api and have been for years and through being aquired twice or more as well.
thank you for covering recycling, since you dont use off the shelve printers and build your own, would it be possible to get maybe specs of your printers, no i dont want to build a print farm for myself i want to build a printer for myself.
If 220c/70c is the catchall print temp for PLA, I'd like to hear the catchall print temp for other common materials. I think your data on material temps would be very helpful for beginners, right now the mindset is that you have to tune with every material from each brand.
One reason to still do per filament tuning is that not every printer reports the same temperature. Creality printers (historically) have been notorious for reporting a temperature that is 5-10 degrees higher than the filament gets. This may be because the sensor is closer to the heating element than with other brands, or may be something in firmware that treats the information from the sensor differently. For whatever reason I can rely on my K1 to under-extrude ToughPLA. It acts like it's got a clog or the extruder mechanism is slipping, bt if I swap out the ToughPLA for Creality HyperPLA, that prints perfectly. But it's a less durable material, so I'm going to keep the Ender3Pro going for the tough stuff and keeping reliable prints coming from that. (As a note, testing for me has involved dropping the print speed from 300 mm/s down as far as 100 mm/s, and temp up from the recommended 225 C, up as high as 245 C, still getting under-extrusion. As a result, I'm not planning on using that filament in that printer any more. I may have better luck with PETG or ASA. We'll see.)
70c seems too high for pla given its heat deflection temperature is 60-65c. I can see a temperature that high leading to a very large elephants foot on parts and potentially sagging as well. However, I do generally print pla at 215-220c.
It's not a branding mistake it's a branding feature. If I have to buy filament from someone other than you I would like to buy filament from someone you buy filament from. At least until you start making it yourself. In the long run cardboard spools are biodegradable and relatively cheap and easy to manufactur. Just my humble opinion.
Not sure how hands off will be Mosaic's Array🤞. Could be useful for engineering materials with designs optimized for lights off printing. Would have liked an AI assisted robotic arm to compensate for manual intervention though😂❤👍
I hear that some of the rep rep conferences have gaylords setup for old spool collection. I would assume with just a little advertising, people would bring their old spools in droves. This would likely be one of the most cost effective methods (besides someone like microcenter offering collection)
lol, I thought you finally realized that "tangled filament" takes a while to figure out you're talking about a brand and not a physically tangled spool, and brings up terrible memories of trying to recover such spools. I doubt you'll lose much if any business due to advertising your competitors. The only people who will see it have already bought your product.
I clicked DESPITE your thumbnail. I almost didn't click lol. I clicked because of your typical content. :) (NO offense meant, thanks for your videos) #SupportiveFeedback
OrangeStorm Giga - thoughts? I am drooling to print a guitar in one go but I slurp it up when I imagine the price tag LOL It is for industrial use from what I have read but still, I have room if they want to send one. Be neat to hear what you think from a professional standpoint and not just a drooling idiot like me.
