Making filament, the industrial way
Please watch the video below! A medium sized company will explain the efforts and machines needed to make commercial filament. From what we see, the machine may cost around 20 000 Euro upwards and requires a quite a long time to tune in all parameters. There are also machines for 8000 Euro with all incl. but to make profit from this activity you need at least 40 of them ..
Ready to use machines
In even larger environments, there are machines called the ‘filament miles’, exceeding easily 5 meters. Such machine can cost around 35000 Euro. Here some thoughts building one from scratch.
Filament making for DIYers
There is success creating filament from printer waste. Please check some of the links below :
We recommend to watch also all the other videos of Werbewunder
3D printing plastic waste and Precious Plastic
Not filament but this here prints recycled pellets.
Or use forum search ‘filament‘.
Other remarks :
- The wood auger drill is simply unfitted as reported multiple times in the forum
- Please check Dave Hakken’s filament maker mile
- Bazar link to LDPE filament but we couldn’t get any feedback
- 3dseed is using grinded plastic then print it right away. The only real suitable plastic type is PET which requires you to have a good shredder (with grinder) in place
- vanplestik.nl managed to print larger diameter of PET
- There is some development to print granulate by Sam (forum link) see here the video.
Projects
Small PET printer (needs 1mm PET flakes)
DIY variant – Github | status : work in progress, next updates in February
Commercial PET printer (uses PET bottles)
Large Printer (uses an extruder as print head)
Github | status : work in progress, next updates in February
Small DIY printer