Coming up, we’re going to turn our failed prints into recycled filament.
hey everybody, welcome to another 3d thursday. Im Noe and Im Pedro.
today we going to break down some failed prints and fire up a filabot to make recycled filament.
thats right, its all about sustainable 3d printing. recycling parts to make new filaments saves money, and reduces waste. lets check it out
3D Printing a whole lot usually means a lot of prototyping.
Before we can start recycling, we need to sort our parts by color and material.
Using these shoe dividers, we can keep the parts separated and organized.
so how much does my print cost? to find that out, we’ll use a simple equation.
we’ll multiply the cost of the filament by the weight of the part, and then divide by 1000 to get our print cost.
so if AdaBot weights 110 grams, than it only costs 4 dollars in filament to print. Thats good to know!
Filament extruders like the filabot, grind plastic mulch and extrude it out making recycled filament.
Before we can start, we’ll need to break down the parts.
We can crush them down with a rubber mallet and use a canvas bag to keep pieces from going everywhere.
Using an electric wood chipper, we can fit in the crushed parts using a feeder and turn them into mulch.
Next, we’ll need to sift through the mulch and remove the bigger chucks. We'll gather up the scraps so we can feed into the filament recycler.
Temperature and extrusion settings vary from material, our guide on the adafruit learning system for has all the details.
The filament needs to extrude a while to get a consistent filament diameter.
you’ll need to have a good amount of recycled mulch for your first batch.
Guide the filament down to the floor and use a fan to cool down the plastic as it coils.
Once you have extruded a few coils, use a caliper to measure the constancy for the filament diameter.
In the next project we’ll find out how well recycled filament prints and compare it to manufactured filament.
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