I’m sure we’ve looked into it, but are we going to pursue a filament recycling system (https://redetec.com/) it would be nice to pop into the makerspace and respool some of the scribbles I’ve made in the past. Surely there is grant money out there for stem/recycling that we could leverage to get a nice De-oops-afier…
@kthutch is researching tool grants. If you or anyone else would like to help the fundraising committee please reach out.
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Trying to recycle 3d printer scraps back into usable filament is a huge pain in the butt and is really not worth the effort. All you end up with is crappy filament and sadness.
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Yeah, I think the best we could do would be to figure out a way to recycle it into something non-filament, but still useful. I melted down some mixed scrap a year or two ago and made an awesome, hard, round plastic thing. It seemed hard enough that it might take machining pretty well, providing it didn’t get too hot in the process.
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I considered cutting open 2ltr bottles and using an iron to melt them into a plastic… thing…
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Not sure how viable this is, but if we decide to go with one then I have several kg of scrap prints at home to donate
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^ I second this. I’ve started keeping my trash filament (failed prints, supports, rafts, etc) because I feel bad about just tossing it in a landfill. If we get a setup for recycling, I’d like to bring my material in.
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Imagine coming in every so often and using the re-filimenter
I’m all for recycling print scraps, but I really don’t think anyone would enjoy trying to turn it back into usable filament. No one that I know who has tried has ended up sticking with it. Consensus online leans strongly towards it not being practical.
It would be much simpler to grind it up and injection mold it into various shapes, or just melt it into sheets or blocks. These designs pop up on our forum every once in a while: https://preciousplastic.com/en/machines.html
We had a member last year that built a grinder based on those designs.
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I’d love to have hex floor tiles
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We do have an injection mold … injection… thing
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I agree, the filament recyclers generally aren’t given great reviews. It’s a pretty involved process to produce reliable high quality filament.
Failed prints and supports as raw material is definitely a good idea though. I like the idea of producing sheet, bar, and round stock from the ground up bits
Injection molding is viable. Its perfect for rapidly making many of the same small object. Say you have a dillons sack of pla scraps.
What useful items do you make?
Smd organization boxes
Bobbins?
Plastic bearings
Plastic nuts and bolts
Standoff screws…