Today on Adafruit’s weekly live 3D Hangouts, we will be sharing a guide and video featuring DIY 3D printing filament and print recycling. Here’s a quick roundup of other DIY 3D Filament stories that caught our interest to whet your appetite!
Founder Tyler McNaney initially came up with Filabot as a means of affordably feeding his own costly desktop 3D printing habit. After a successful crowdfunding run with his Filabot filament extruder system, Filabot now has a growing catalog of machines and tools designed to help bring practical DIY filament manufacturing to desktop 3D printing enthusiasts. This small company has shipped DIY filament systems and Reclaimers all over the world. In the meantime, this project has raised awareness throughout the 3D printing community about the environmental impact of 3DP — and the potential of recycling and working from raw elements to reduce this impact.
Check out McNaney’s detailed tutorial for creating your own DIY filament extruder over @ MAKE and check out this article from WIRED to get a snap shot of the project as it completed its first year after being funded.
From a post they shared recently: Filabot Offers Two Options for Failed Print Recycling:
3D printing is awesome, except for the failed prints. Those fails prints are awful to see, but are even worse to have sitting in a pile. Such a waste of material. Recycling centers don’t even accept those failed prints, as there is no labeling on them. But we are putting an end to all that, we now offer two ways to recycle your failed prints. With both these options, no longer is there worry about the environmental impact of discarded prints.
Filabot Reclaimer
One option is to use our Filabot Reclaimer to grind up old prints to extrude. This is for those who want to have that instant gratification of recycling. You may end up wanting failed prints to happen, just to use it.
Mail to Filabot
Another option is to simply package up your failed prints and mail them to our Vermont warehouse. We can utilize any size, shape, color, plastic type, at our warehouse to grind and turn back into pellets or filament. It does help if you sort the types of plastic into separate bags. We can recycle ABS, PLA, HIPS, Laywood, taulman filament, etc. Check out the grinder industrial grinder we use to turn large chunks into small chunks…. [Ed. note: it is a free service!]
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! We also offer the LulzBot TAZ – Open source 3D Printer and the Printrbot Simple Metal 3D Printer in our store. If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!