This is unconventional and I know there’s a lot of maintenance involved. I was thinking of ways to encourage use of our filament without having to worry about the honor system. We’ve discussed this before but I’m wondering how feasible it would be.
I was thinking we use a snack vending machine like this
http://dallas.craigslist.org/dal/app/5784903085.html
Fill it with 250 or 500g spools or filament (I found a few vendors like eSun) and sell them for $5-10 each. That way we can still encourage new people to print and still provide a variety of colors.
Pearce did this a while ago but I remember it being a lot of work and people wouldn’t recycle the spools, I think if we can find vendors that have affordable smaller sizes it would work better. I’m not sure how it would fit in the spiral vending machine sections but I’m thinking this would make it much easier and accessible for people to have filament.