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?
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.