I’m sure this has come up before, but I’d like to gauge interest for this sort of thing. I found an interesting looking project on Prusa Printables, and wanted to see what the other 3D Printing aficionados thought of it:
https://www.printables.com/model/356919-pet-filament-machine/comments
What interests me is that this design doesn’t use plastic pellets or tiny chunks of ground up prints, instead it uses spiral-cut strips of PET bottle. It may not necessarily be particularly practical, but it could be a fun project…the real question is where to put it lol
We had (might still have) an extruder set up for turning pellets into filament. Can’t recall the reason we never got it 100% up and running, but we did have one once upon a time
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It seems like @themitch22 was working on that. Mind you, if I remember right, it was just too much of a process for everybody, and it got dropped for lack of interest.
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Makes sense, the cost/benefit ratio (in both time and money) doesn’t beat just buying another spool of filament.
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The filastruder we voted to sell/donate (it should be in meeting notes on the wiki somewhere) it was a pain to use and one member got it working but abandoned it.
The PET bottle strip extruder is honestly a much more practical way to recycle than shredding PLA scrap into pellets. It’s also much cheaper and easier to build since it repurposes common printer parts.
It sounds like a great project for 3D fab, you would just need to collect cleaned 2L bottles.
Thanks! I’ll keep that in mind for after I’m finished with my current project (no idea when, got a lot of design work to do)
It’s not something that I would have room at home for, so it would likely need to stay somewhere in the 3D Fab area. That’s assuming, of course, that I get a couple of other Makers interested in it and get it actually built. Still, it’s nice to have ideas floating around.