According to [Alex], it is easy to make your own 3D printed wire rolls, even if the existing off-the-shelf solutions do not work well. His explanation for this is economics. He used locally sourced high-torque induction motors and gearboxes to build a filament extruder. He believes that transporting heavy gears would make similar extruders commercially unattractive. He invested about $600 in equipment, but estimated that a company would need to charge at least $1,500 or more for the same thing. This may seem steep, but as [Alex] pointed out, a roll of 1 kilogram of filament actually only has about 750 grams of filament and plastic particles, and the cost per kilogram is US$2 to US$3.
Of course, there are other costs, such as the electricity needed to heat and move the plastic. Despite this, the system seems to use about $1 in electricity for every 10 kg of filament. You can see this process in the video below.
If you think about it, this mechanism is not much different from a 3D printer. You heat the plastic, force it through a nozzle, and it will cool. The biggest difference is that you don't move around, you must use a screw feed to manage the pellets. It turns out that screws and related parts account for a large part of the machine's cost.
Another key component is the 1 HP motor. A typical motor runs at 1800 RPM, so you also need a gearbox to slow it down. You also need to drive electronics, heaters, and temperature control. If you pay retail prices for all items, you will not be able to match the $600 price tag. However, it can be found that the motor and a considerable number of motors are used or recycled. Many details are in the second article. Details of the part of the machine that winds the new filament are in another article.
If you don't want to spend that much money, you can also make a smaller version that can produce about 2 kilograms per hour instead of 5 kilograms per hour on a large machine. The little sister uses an electric bicycle motor, and the price of the whole thing should be much less than 500 US dollars. There are several other posts that link to the original post, including notes about the required water bath, measuring the thickness of the filament, and even selling filament for profit.
We have seen a lot of methods for making filaments. Some even claim to spend about $100.
Please note that if you search for "filament extruder" on Youtube, there are (actual) hundreds of projects, most of which are successful.
I really hope that there is a core open source project that aims to make the most of everything around and package it into an open source design, which may gain a lot of traction.
A few years ago, Reprap would accept the challenge, but unfortunately, the community has been diluted by all users of Chinese $100 machines, which is very sad.
Also, if you only want to buy one of them, please check RobotDigg’s youtube channel/shop, they have a very good one for sale, and there are many different configurations: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkUucvahb8g3z7HSZCd8Keg
Coupled with the cheap and easily available large number of filaments, which have better tolerances, dry packaging, etc., which makes DIY extrusion not worth the cost of admission, except for the real big players.
I may have to handle 5-10 kilograms per year. If the price of these items is half of the original price, it can save $10/kg, so... this machine barely recovers the cost, but it takes up all of my narrow space Basement workshop.
I talked to a group of self-made people, and they all agreed that the real trick is to keep the filament tension and cooling rate consistent after extrusion is the key. I am surprised that we did not see any closed loop system with a thickness gauge (a pair?) and some slow PID. How does Dachang do it?
But yes. Reprap was a success-now everyone can have a decent printer for less! Long live, we won. It's just not like we thought...
> Now everyone can have a decent printer for less money!
not necessarily. I haven't seen any original works in Ender 3's electronic equipment or software. Flash the firmware and replace parts to meet your needs.
What is unlikely? ? The printer's design is not open source, who cares if they also use open source firmware... That's not the point.
You can't make your own Ender 3, you can make your own Prusa...
Let me try again. ender 3 is not open source because its components or software are proprietary.
For open source hardware designs, the source files must be available under an open source license. Is this the case of Ender3?
You claim in your post that anything cheap is closed source. Maybe you should run the example I quoted through Google before answering me wrong? twice? But I will save you trouble.
https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3/tree/master/Ender-3%20Mechanical
I don’t particularly like Ender 3; but as the best-selling printer I thought of, it didn’t seem to match your statement, so I quoted it.
> You claim in your post that anything cheap is closed source.
I'm not. Although it is an overwhelming majority. Ender is a rare exception. I'm not talking about Ender, I'm talking about the general situation.
https://github.com/Creality3DPrinting/Ender-3
*Sigh* The first line of the repo, is it that difficult?
"Creality3D Ender-3, a completely open source 3D printer, very suitable for new users with limited budgets."
This is very interesting, thank you. However, I have a good reason to think that this is not the case/asking if it is the case: this is extremely rare for Chinese machines. This is an exception to the real confirmation rule.
This kind of "open source" does not translate well into hardware. Of course, "Ender 3" is "open source hardware". Like many software, its documentation is poor.
Get some high-resolution photos from the "web". Then buy yourself an extruded aluminum tube, some wheels, rods, etc., and screw all the parts together.
You can clone a lot of rero from github/gitlab/etc for free, but the real hardware costs money. Manual assembly is also more complicated than running make on the cloned repo.
This is what those Chinese toolkits look like. They are a package of parts and cost roughly the same (or less?) as the parts themselves. They just need some skills and time to combine them.
There is an open source plastic recycling system for precious plastics (https://preciousplastic.com/solutions/machines/overview.html). They have been hack-a-day before, and their extruders are very similar to this one
Of course! It's really weird, I skipped PP in my mind, this is the obvious answer to my question. thanks.
"A few years ago, Reprap would accept the challenge, but unfortunately, this community has been diluted by all the users of Chinese $100 machines"
What? ! ? How does this work?
How does "dilution" prevent the community from developing something? If there are as many people interested in development as before, nothing can stop them from collaborating and doing more development as they did in the past. In fact, many people produce things in factories based on their previous jobs, and there shouldn’t be any barriers for more people to consume it.
Remember all the "wealth without money" in the heyday of RepRap? We should all print all our daily necessities. I don't know if we can always reach the utopia of 3D printing (and there are many doubts), but we are still moving in this general direction.
I think, if anything, the people who will be part of the RepRap project today, the people who started it, and the young hackers and manufacturers who were supposed to be born later, are just solving the next aspect of the problem. They are designing. They are not trying to reinvent the 3D printer. They are designing what we will print with our printer. This is as it should be, because it is what we need most today.
Remember when we used to print only small wine glasses, replacement printer parts and whistle? Then there are a lot of decorative figurines. In my opinion, the development of practical and functional objects is slow but accelerating. It is slowly accelerating, but it is happening. Similarly, engineering technology for 3D printing seems to have developed more. For example, take a look at what we recently saw on HaD involving 3D printed springs.
In my opinion, RepRap is still alive and has not been affected by "dilution" at all. It's just that today's "RepRappers" are doing what is needed today, developing more things than printers, and they may not even realize that they are even "RepRappers". However, they are advancing the goals of the RepRap project.
There is no doubt that as we finally see huge, game-changing advancements (for example, I hope practical home metal printing!), we will see temporary absorption in the development of more traditional RepRap to improve them. But in the age between the two, the action lies in things, not printers.
The Reprap community has shifted from actually developing things to trying to help those who have $100 printers who can’t make them work and flood the community. It is time-consuming, ubiquitous, and directly related to the death of actual research within the project. You made a statement to the Reprap community. It sounds like you are not an active participant in it. You have a very strange view of the project, which is very abstract and does not match the reality of what happened today...
No, you will get the right result for the wrong reason. Helping the novice is not the reason to kill it.
In my garage there is a malfunction of a behemoth "rep-strap" built from scratch. There is an MPSM in my craft room, which is enough, I never really "needed" the damaged one, so it was still abandoned.
For the same reason, 90% of the representative rappers will not work on filament, $15/kg and have a good tolerance "good enough", unless you plan to run a business that sells filament or run a printing farm, otherwise You don't care about going to work.
In addition, most of the best researchers, engineers, and manufacturers in the field of 3D printing are employed by profitable companies.
I am sure that dilution has an impact on those who stayed, but it is much less than those who stayed.
Most people are there because they want a 3D printer that can print beautiful photos, and now we have it.
This is wrong. Reprap is still making progress. It also extends to other manufacturing technologies. This is just *a lot slower*, largely due to the Chinese clone, in several ways (support, lack of revenue for developers, closed design not contributing to the ecosystem, etc...). If you think that Reprap is what it is now because it is "good enough", then you have not been involved in it recently.
The $100 printer is now very good, and all that is left are fancy things like optical end stops and position feedback, which they might have soon.
However, the slicer still has a lot of room for development. The non-planar layer will be revolutionary.
«$100 printers are very good now» This can only be said from the mouths of people who do not need to help newcomers use these machines. The 3D printing community is full of users who have various problems with these machines, most of which are related to quality, that is, the machine is a complete mess. Some are better than others, but no, they are definitely not *incredibly good*, most are still the lowest quality junk, can only survive for a few months at most, and can only be made normal after a considerable amount of hacking Work first.
In addition, no, they will never get optical stop or position feedback, because these are not needed. Without these, you can make perfect printers, so you won't see them becoming commonplace, especially on the cheapest machines...
As far as you are concerned, the community does and does create new open source printers. https://youtu.be/R5psYLsCUlk as an example
Yes, it is also making progress in various parts of the machine (electronic equipment, hot end, etc.). It also expanded to other manufacturing methods (before they exploded, it was the first SLA printer, open source, lemon curry), and just last week, I saw a mix of 3D printing and CNC milling on a single part. Modern Reprap electronic devices (Smoothieware) have the unique/new ability to mix these technologies in a single firmware while maintaining standard compliance. There are a lot of things happening, and just because a person is not told does not mean that the information does not exist.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/3dprint.com/144236/shred-buddy-3d-recycler/amp/
The Ctrl+F on the page does not match the "open source" Kickstarter. Am i missing something?
"One kilogram of filament really only has 750 grams of filament." This is how the rumor was created. One person wrote something problematic on a simple website, and then copied the content on another more influential website. Although I think the author here also thinks the information is problematic, so keep a distance from it by mentioning "but as [Alex] pointed out"). But the harm has been done... the seeds of the rumors have been planted. Maybe soon, this will become very popular. Suddenly, the public begins to believe that all spools are sold as a scam... and all of this is because the gross and net weights seem to be confusing. Therefore, I like to see some references here, because according to the seller, every 1 kg of spool I buy is 1 kg of filament, and they always explicitly mention the net weight as the net weight instead of the total weight. Maybe I should check it out? Maybe I should also check my sugar bags, milk bottles, and bread slices?
But printing your own filament is more than just melting particles, you need to cool it in a controlled way and wind it in a controlled way, otherwise you will have many low-cost but cumbersome filament spools that will eventually lead to questionable quality 3D printing. But other than that, this is a very interesting project, and it looks great. I always thought it would be good to build one. But then I realized that if I only use 2 or 3 spools per year, do I really need one?
I did a quick check and the filament I bought is 1 kg net weight. But I'm not sure that no one sells 1kg gross weight spools, so I am not going to say that Alex's statement is wrong. I did notice that the gross weight seems to be everywhere, some claiming 1.1 kg and some as high as 1.4 kg. I want to know if the weight of the spool really makes such a big difference?
For example, here is a "1 kg spool" (in the title) but in the specification it does say 0.9kg weight and comments (small deviation): https://3dprintingzoom.com/product/ctc-pla -3d- printer-filament-consumables-Dimension-accuracy-0-02-mm-1-kg-spool-1-75-mm-black-pack-of-1/. Now, suppose this is not 750 grams, but... of course, If some 1 kg net spool has a gross weight of 1.4 kg, and you use that spool to get a 1 kg wool spool, then you will have 600 grams of plastic, so it is likely that the spool has a net weight.
As anecdotal evidence, every cheap spool that I throw on a scale claiming to be 1 kg is 1 kg of filament.
There are a specified number of filaments on each roll of filament I buy. Advertising it as 1 kg (including the weight of the spool) would be a false or deceptive advertisement.
Having to go through the filament stage at all seems inefficient. We need a printer with a funnel on the top: clamp the pellet/discarded print on the top, and print a new print on the bottom!
There are many direct extruder projects around. I have personally come into contact with two start-up companies that manufacture 3D printers based on direct pellet extruders.
This method/first attempt is very promising for me:
https://www.homofaciens.de/technics-machines-3D-printer-Granule-Extruder_en.htm
Are they bigger? Since the particles have not yet fused together, how did they reach it?
These exist, although the extruder is larger. Look for "Particle 3D Printer".
For a very neat particle printer, check this out. "SeeMeCNC's Part Daddy 3D Printer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9CVRVnwtjE It is a bit bigger than my Deltaprintr!
I am talking to a person who teaches how to produce filaments in 3D printing. He grinds up old prints and sends them into an extruder. It is installed vertically, so the filament is straight down. It cools and then circulates through a line scan camera, which controls the reel back to the top. This sounds better than running horizontally.
Ok. I think it might be the same as you think. If I were to build a pellet extruder for filament manufacturing, I would consider building it vertically so that I could eventually integrate it into a large-format printer. It would be cool if you could use the same extruder to print large objects and make filaments for smaller printers by parking it, changing nozzles, and setting up a winder on the bed.
You nailed it. Compared to buying a more precise off-the-shelf filament, the grinder option for recycling may make it more palatable to roll the filament yourself. I have a lot of prints that can be ground, early iterations, etc. Someone needs to invent a parts shredder, just like they used to shred whole cars, but on a smaller scale.
This guy is really a hypocrite. He brags about how cheap the filament he makes per kilogram, and his filament is sold on his website for 35-50 US dollars per kilogram.
He is not. He is betraying his time. Not everyone will make their own filament spools because they do not have the skills, tools, or willingness to do so.
In addition to the filament, he has his own costs. He must maintain his website, monitor payments, mail goods, and purchase more materials. Almost everyone doesn't need to do things, and he doesn't need to do all of them for free. And he does not need to charge a fee for his work plus a cent or two. He can charge what the customer is willing to pay.
I don't care if someone sells me a filament that he made for $0.50 for $35, but it is equivalent to the filament I bought for at least $50. I don't care if someone sells me an Arduino for $150, which replaces my washing machine motherboard for $250.
Let them make money! I'm saving money, and this is what I care about.
Otherwise, computer programmers will have to charge close to zero fees, because all they do is convert caffeine into code and spend only a little bit of electricity.
Yes, it is frightening to see such a reaction, and some people have no idea how the business works. In a certain way, they believe that if someone makes a profit, they must be abusing their customers. How to make a living? ? ?
Just buy it from 3DPlastx, this guy also makes pellets in his garage, 900 grams is about 13 euros, including shipping to the entire Europe.
How does this make him a hypocrite? If he says that it is morally wrong to sell the filament at a price above cost, then yes, he is a hypocrite. I can't see where he said it.
You can say that he is betraying his time, but even then it is not 100% accurate. Who is sitting there and things "What is the minimum amount of money I would like to produce this project for the benefit of some stranger in the next hour of my life"? The price is determined by the market. This is the relationship between supply and demand. Currently, this is the price range at which the market is willing to buy a roll of filament. Why should he sell it at a low price? Is he a philanthropist?
Maybe if you want filament for public welfare, education, nurses' personal protective equipment, the needs of the poor, etc., and you ask him well, he will give you a better deal. Or maybe not. Maybe he only has enough time and resources to produce and sell to support his own hobbies by selling at market prices.
But he did share information on how to make your filament cheaper, and you can exclude him from the transaction if you want. That's cool. Don't be a bastard.
I don't think they are hypocrites, because it depends on the number. But in the past few months, they must have annoyed the promotion of this to /r/3dprinting and related subs.
I tried to sell it at a lower price, but potential buyers think that the quality of the filament is lower (maybe this is the reason why it is cheap?), so many people are skeptical about the purchase. Pricing in the normal range is more convincing.
Once upon a time, I worked for a small package delivery service company. One thing keeps happening: the driver will leave and start his own business, fail and then return to the driver.
Because they think if they get paid every time the package is delivered, why not lay off the company. The number of customers allows them to gather locations and have reasonable routes, which also increases costs, and at the same time must try to manage everything, not just delivery/collection, which also increases the efficiency of individual operations and increases the cost of functions. The list is endless.
I feel that although the specific circumstances are different, the concept is directly applicable.
In the Amazon-style world of online delivery, it seems reasonable to think this way, hey, I can break this machine, and even considering the power and so on, it can make the product cheaper.
But to actually operate, you must either make a lot of upfront investment, or produce in advance and increase inventory, or put it on demand, and small things such as small-batch transportation will consume profits. In addition, if you are preparing mass production inventory, how do you protect the plastic? Now you might be adding a vacuum packaging machine? Maybe the box. What about those spools?
How about the wear of machine parts? Where do you store your mass production? If you want to process cc payments, do you pay for the loss through Amazon and through them or do your own storefront and food expenses there?
Most importantly, there may be a whole book worth considering before you actually do it, and you may not have seen it yet.
If you are a local or contact that person, you may find this possibility, and you may also have more flexibility, which Amazon generally doesn't like.
I think tldr will be economies of scale not just to produce more and cheaper things.
I have been using Filasttruder for several years and I like it very much. Sometimes it is difficult to get polycarbonate, but when I can get pellets, Filastruder can make excellent filaments with super high resistance. I print a lot of composite materials (carbon cut polycarbonate and carbon cut nylon, mainly for stiffness and disappearing layer lines), so I don't always use Filastruder. I used it to make ABS and PETG, and they are as effective as commercial filaments in my E3D V6 Gold.
If anyone wants a commercial option with warranty and service/support, this is just a suggestion.
It seems that the image of the filament extruder is the same as the image in this aliexpress list? How strange.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001125306450.html
Yes, I think the image is not actually constructed by him. I think it is the "SJ35 plastic extruder" from alibaba/aliexpress.
Yes, this is not something I built. If you read my guide, I use this image because it explains the extruder parts and how they fit together. My extruder was a bit messy and not so clean, so I used the cleanest example I could find.
Yes, I have...'Looks like an ordinary Chinese kit with those Louvre coverings/construction/feeling it'. Sorry, it sounds lame, but this is what popped into my mind.
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