Can you print (with) your spools?
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 18 ต.ค. 2024
- Let’s find out what materials we can and can’t shred into 3D printer filament!
Thanks to 3devo for sponsoring the video and loaning me their machines - learn how they can work for your filament creation needs at bit.ly/discove...
The printed clamps are the ”CNC low profile clamps” by TaylorsMake www.printables...
Product links are affiliate links - I may earn a commission on qualifying purchases (at no extra cost to you)
🎥 All my video gear toms3d.org/my-...
I use Epidemic Sound, sign up for a 30-day free trial here share.epidemics...
🎧 Check out the Meltzone Podcast (with CNC Kitchen)! / @themeltzone
👐 Enjoying the videos? Support my work on Patreon! / toms3dp
I recently read a paper "Mechanical properties of ternary blends of ABS, HIPS and PETG". It's from research in South Africa where there is a substantial purge volume from sheet extrusion when they change material, and they really would like to use the intermediate materials somehow and not let them go to waste.
What i learned is that ABS and PETG are compatible with each other and produce a cohesive plastic. But how does it print? It could have really interesting properties, don't you think? And also that adding any amount of HIPS destroys cohesion. Which is funny since HIPS is not a copolymer but a blend itself. One should be really careful with what garbage polymer ends up in the mix, for example any amount of PP would be very much not OK.
The other thing i learned is that one can use SBS (Styroflex 2g66) as a universal cohesion agent which may make bad polymers and dumb mixtures workable.
Trash-grade polymers aren't a good idea for recycling into 3D print filament. They can work well when pressed into sheets, however. You can then use those sheets to make a bunch of things. Teaching Tech has a nice video on using a t shirt press for this.
Great Video. Alot of people think it's so easy to just recycle your filaments. Thanks for fully explaining how hard it really is.
I love the lizard doggo in the background! I have been so hooked on Satisfactory that I didn't even bat an eye when I noticed it but then towards the end of the video it hit me - Thomas loves Satisfactory too!
i just started playing the 1.0 update as i was watching this video lol
satisfactory is great
Definitely a wonderful game❤
You should try out regular household plastic waste. PET printing (from bottles) has been explored before, but it could be further refined and there are other kinds of plastics out there as well.
Most of mine are cardboard these days
same. I can't even remember the last time I got a plastic spoil.
Same, and I believe cardboard is a lot easier to recycle as well. Although whenever I look at the social media accounts of those who make cardboard spools, there's always a lot of complaints from the Bambu AMS crowd. Bambu needs to make their AMS work better with cardboard spools.
@@logicalfundybambu took the approach of using Reusable spools. You just buy refills. It's actually weird to me that people with bambu AMS systems would complain about cardboard spools when you can just slide the filament onto a bambu spool and call it a day...
And if you bought their printer but never their filament, for whatever reason, print a reusable spool... there are so many designs out there.
There's basically 0 reason to be asking any filament makers to move away from cardboard.
@@logicalfundy Then send them to print a brim around the cardboard spool. I own an AMS and there are no problems with that. The main problem that I have is that cardboard spools seem to hold quite a bit of moisture or something because the filament on cardboard spools a lot more often has to be dried before use, otherwise it can give horrible results.
Imo refills with no spools are a better idea. If you don't have a reusable spool you can just print one. Wish more companies would do refills but there would probably be a fair bit of knots before they figure that stuff out...
@@SquintyGears Well, there are some good reasons for why cardboard is not so great. Tbh it's not just as easy as 'sliding' the filament unto another spool. I don't browse these 'groups' but I have an AMS and there are dedicated brims that you pop around the cardboard spool. People just love complaining about everything... My only complaint about cardboard is that it holds moisture and the filament that arrives on them seems to be more often wet which leads to complains about quality. But that is only because I don't have a proper filament dryer...
I don't know how much better the cardboard is in the long run but I wouldn't mind if the companies switched to the refill style with only that cardboard core that you slide unto the reusable spool etc. Feels like that would be the best of both worlds.
Couple years back, I had the delight to work with 3devo products, the shredder and what was then their top of the line extruder. The shredder kept jamming, and when asked about it, their support had no idea how it actually worked, and (I am NOT kidding about this), they took pictures of themselves shoving plastic bits into it with thick wooden boards, and suggested we try the same. Their extruder promised something like 0,5/1kg of filament an hour, but it barely managed to do about 2-3kg a day, that is when it worked at all. An utterly miserable experience, and all those terrible memories of endless lost time came to me when Thomas mentioned 3devo. ...now to watch the rest of the video! :D
That sounds horrible haha
@@ares395 It was :D The shredder here seems like a new version and seem much more capable than what we used, but the extruder seems to be the same (on the outside), ours was just a darker color, the "pro" version. The whole project lasted about a year, we had professors from local engineering college get involved in it, one of them even made an addition for the extruder's hopper so it wouldn't get stuck so often. Eventually everyone just kind of gave up on it, and we all went to do our own things. Mind you, this was in 2017-2018, when the whole 3D printing was starting to boom, if they're still using the same extruder as they did back then, that's just horrible.
Oh good grief. That sounds a lot like a company rebranding products and drop shipping to customers without actually knowing how it works. lol.
What I want to use recycled filament for, on the Prusa XL: use recycled material with a 0.8/1.0/1.2mm nozzle, and make the inside of every model and all infill out of any color. Tool change for the outer layers to be new material through 0.4mm nozzles. How much print time and filament would it save? Can it get close to regular surface quality? Can you ignore more contaminants with huge nozzles?
I think you've missed that there's plasticizers in fresh filament/fresh material. 50:50 mix worked because you had the plasticizer in 50% of it. Recycled PLA are a thing not because of perfect conditions, but because of additives. I assume we're burning out the plasticizers during printing and that's some of the fumes and smell we get.
Do retro reflective like Reflect-O-Lay, but with translucent PETG and translucent TPU
I worked a bit with injection molding during the summer, and yeah... we had 3 different purging compounds to satisfy the temperature ranges of all the different plastics we ran (prototyping machine). It sure is important!
Toss up some 80-20 mix of PETG+PLA, to create a weak support filament that prints but then easily crumbles away when it's done with its job.
I've found the prospect of being able to recycle or create my own filament so attractive and appealing since I started 3D printing like 10 years ago.
It's a shame that it's still a big hassle and expensive for fairly inconsistent results.
The PET pullstrusion technique seems to be the most practical way for normal people to recycle.
17K €, certainly not for the hobbyist.
who tf is this thing for? its not for me, thats for certain. boring
@@DeltreeZero3D print farm at mid to large scale is my guess. The user needs to use large amount of filament and have ability to control the quality and purity of thr material. Recycler's biggest issue will be the purity of material; having contaminated such as PLA, PETG can ruined the batch
@@kullwarrior I don't think it's for print farms either. The effort is too high for the process to make any economic sense. Like Thomas said in the video, these are for material science (plastics, colorings, other additives - i.e. where new filaments are developed).
*laughts in boat*
I dont even see enough there to cost that much
There are devices that can identify the type of plastic a thing is using spectroscopy but I'm not sure how accurate they are with identifying co-polymers and such. This might help with sorting stuff before it gets shredded.
Also, the contaminated shredded plastic isn't necessarily a lost cause. It can still be melted and molded into other things. The Brothers Make channel has some good ideas on ways to recycle plastics.
Contamination is nearly always VERY bad. Same Brothers Make are very very meticulous, they have to be. If even a little bit of PP gets into a batch of PE or vice versa, you can throw away the whole batch, it's not going to make a cohesive casting. HIPS quickly destroys adhesion of ABS, lots of other examples.
Personally I want to start a filament recycling centre. But I need funding.
Love the 3devo machines.
CNC kitchen has one also.
I go through about 30 spools a year at present.
Much is support material and rafts.
Would love to turn that back into filament.
You don't have to make filament with the shredded material. Teaching Tech used shredded prints to make sheets of abstract colored plastic that can be used in DIY craft projects. I would imagine you would have less issues with slightly contaminated shreds. In my opinion, that's probably a much better use for empty spools and leftover/failed prints.
Step 1) have an expensive machine
Step 2) have an engine hoist
Step 3) ????
Step 4) profit
Far more expensive machines, like engines, get lifted every day with similar engine hoists. The lifting straps are a bit dodgy, but I've seen far worse done by people who are supposed to know a lot more about rigging.
Can you try some household materials, like shredded yoghurt cups or so? Just to see, if there is a point in recycling this kind of waste by yourself... Or maybe housings of broken appliances or devices like radios tv remotes etc. isn't there the possibility to identify the material with infrared light or so? I vaguely remember seeing something like that...
Yes you saw that on Brothers Make channel, probably, they use one of those IR gadgets. But it only works on translucent colours, doesn't work on black. Also we do usually have polymer ID marks.
We have a 3Devo extruder and shredder. We like it so much, because we can make a lots of different blends and filled filaments. Only downside is the srew. It is not the best at homogenous extrudes.
Try to make blends of filaments e.g. PC-ABS. Obviously need to overlap temperatures a bit but would be interesting to see what's possible
What I don't get is why everyone hasn't just adopted a similar refill system to Bambulab spools. Reuse is the best part of the 3 rs
There have been plenty of filament brands that offer refills or use cardboard spools for years, but it's not cost-effective. If you can wind straight onto the spool and require no post-processing it's much cheaper than having to then move the length of filament off the spool (without it tangling), and the spools are much less likely to tangle due to user error than refills. Cardboard spools aren't nearly as easy to produce and aren't as sturdy, so plastic is used.
@@daylen577 Not cost effective? their filament is some of the cheapest quality filament and only had a thin cardboard roll and the RFID tag.
Its also one of the better reattach enter systems (Other ones I've used had thumb screws for instance).
Also confused why cardboard spools were brought up. I'm talking about refills for plastic spools.
Or sometimes called spooless spools.
LIZZARDDOGGOOOOOOO!!!!! 🙂
I bougth the build gun electronics and plan to print the build gun.
what a genius idea, i always hated the waste generated by spools
Nice lizard doggo. I like it.
Thomas, it's great to see that even a veteran like you is still learning the hard way! I remember watching you build a Printrbot about 10 years ago, which inspired me to buy my own and get into 3D printing. The printer had its technical challenges, much like what you're facing now. Do you think in another 10 years we'll have a disruptive brand similar to Bambu Lab making 3D recycling as simple as tossing in plastic and getting filament out? We're not there yet, but who would’ve thought 3D printing would be this easy today? Just an interesting thought. Keep doing what you do!
I'd like to see if there's a way to recreate PLA+/Pro blends. Most of them are a secrete blend of additives that make them stronger than regular PLA, and it'd be neat if you could try making something comparable to something like Polymaker's PLA Pro (I mention them specifically, since they have a standardized testing method they use for their filaments). It'd also be fun and interesting to learn what additives are possibly being added to make them strong.
I find extruding your own often produces out-of-spec filament, which is generally unusable if it is less than 1.5mm or more than 2mm. I find Bambulabs x1c cannot feed filament out of this range, does Peopoly or Prusa XL have a better tolerance? Can you add the InFiDEL to one of those open source printers to show how well it improves the print quality when using such spools?
trash printing all kinds of containers and lids would be a nice thing, or graphene infused material
nice editing and filming, and now you have a setup straight out of everyones early 3d printing dreams
Tom, it'd be cool to see you make carbon or glass fiber reinforced abs. I've seen these powders or chopped fibers available to purchase for a pretty low cost but i am not aware of a good way to mix them consistently in the hopper.
I suspect when manufacturers use them, they get them pelletised with EVA binder, aka hot melt glue. A little bit of EVA doesn't outright ruin any plastic. But that's just a hunch.
How much filament would you need to extrude to offset the cost of recycling machine?
In commercial recycling they will mix like materials together, but the systems are quite a bit different. The sprue size is WAY bigger than our tiny hot ends. This allows for inconsistencies. Place by me makes plastic pallets and plastic barrel carriers out of recycled resins. The machine is sloppy as all get out, not precision at all. The feed sprue is at least 10mm in diamater...yea, they are huge.
You are 100% that when you see "recycled content" it is generally scraps from their own manufacturing. Funny thing there? SO many places where I live have been doing this for a LONG time, but now they are putting in their specifications...AND CHARGING for it. Genius on them, but when I used to negotiate with these shoot and ship houses they were all "Oh this is so complex". I was always "So, please, take me through it, 2 years ago, before your "Recycled Content" resins you had a grinder, drier and dust separator on all your injection mold presses. You took the sprue(s) and runners and put them into the shredder, it then went to the dryer, then to the dust separator. There it was metered into the resin. What changed". Of course...NOTHING. Except they charged MORE because "it requires more process". Yea...and so many people ate that up as fact. :(
Way back in the day we bought protocycler serial number 8 from Kickstarter and actually made about 20kg of petg abs and asa with it. Dry time is about 80C for 4 hours and no food dehydrator is gonna do that better a convection oven. You found out the hard way that is the second biggest factor behind mixed plastic types. Petg is almost infinitely recyclable where abs gets brittle a few cycles in due to butadiene and chain breaks.
Please shred PET bottles. Pulltrusion recycling already exists, but only uses the middle part of the bottle. I love my pulltrusion recycler, but i always feel bad about throwing the top and bottom parts away
You only throw them away because it's more complicated to adjust for the varying thickness and it requires more manual speed tuning. But you could use most of the bottle if you baby the process at the start and at the end. you'd only be left with the screw part for the cap. Too thick to get cut on the blade from being pulled.
Because even inconsistent thickness can be fixed by running the filament output through the setup again with a tuned setting.
He is based in Germany, You pay a deposit on the bottle in Germany (0.25€ for a plastic one), which you get back when you bring it back for recycling. Not sure it makes sense to recycle bottles to filament in Germany.
@@Rok_Satanas There are several non-deposit PET sources in Germany. Drink syrup/concentrate bottles. Cosmetics and food packaging, packaging of non-food items.
Remember the grocery store bed adhesives video? I think I have an idea for part 2
I want cheese filament!
I accidentally bought some recycled fillament tried printing and it was garbage, all bendy and not stiff. I wish it would work better.
energy consumption info is missing
Buy and shred one of those cheap plastic stackable chairs!
We own a 3devo Precision extruder and a small shredder by QiTech (built like a tank!). The recycling process is fiddly, but it's actually possible to recycle PLA and to print with no issues with produced rPLA. Our experiments with HDPE filament production (our actual goal) were not successful though.
Hey I have a few kg of polystyrene spools I shredded about a year ago just in a bag. I was waiting for this video.
Thomas, sorry that I couldn't contact you any other way, but I need to ask your opinion. As a respected member of the 3D print community, I was hoping you could lend your expert opinion to my question regarding a swappable nozzle system for the Bambu P1S. I only have the standard nozzles now and was wondering what you would suggest as being a good product to use. I am considering doing a lot more with the printer, which may involve swapping nozzles more often, and I would like an easier way of doing it other than with the default “complete” hotend units on the Bambu Lab P1S. Remove 3 wires, remove two screws, remove complete hotend, and reverse to install. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but if I could simply swap the nozzle, I think it would be less time consuming and fiddly, especially when dealing with re-attaching the wires, which I have found to be very persnickety. Thanks for getting back to me!
At 3:14 there are two things being done wrong:
1. Ratchet straps according to EN 12195-2 are not to be used for lifting. Better thing to use would be something like round slings. I'm aware not everyone has them laying around, but if you own an engine hoist, you should probably get some proper lifting gear.
2. You should not be putting these hooks into each other. It will cause the hooks to widen and form hairline cracs, which can lead them to break far below their load capacity.
Despite the use, I'm pretty positive he was now where near the lift capacity of either the hoist or the straps. While not according to regulations, home gamers really don't know anything about rigging and the regulations that go with it, (nor are they covered by such regulations). So unless you want to ban all sales of such lifting devices and/or require training and licensure to even purchase and own such things, this will never be prevented.
@@ringding1000 I think informing him of the risks is a good alternative to that, which is what they did
I really want to see a recycling initiative that targets the HIPs sprues that come from Games Workshop, Bandai, Tamiya, and other high-volume producers of model kits. When 50% of what's in the box is virtually uncontaminated material yet marked as waste, there's definitely room for improvement.
They sell you a huge grinder that generates microplastics when all they needed to do was have a pre-heat chamber to make your source material able to blend together. The auger that feeds the extrusion can be preceded by a mixing system using arms or motion, etc...but grinding doesn't need to happen, I guess they'd have to include a precision controller and more sensors but it would take up far less space, make far less impact on environment, be much less expensive, and a huge piece of equipment made by consuming and/or contaminating a lot of natural resources completely avoided.
The extrusion is working okay, though. That in itself is pretty impressive!
But careful - if you turn all your spools into filament, you'll have to print a spool to keep it on.
Abs is almost the same density of water and PLA is heavier. Maybe you could separate them by throwing into salt walter and removing everything that floats
How about HDPE plastic? It's very common but has a lot of shrinkage. I don't think I've seen anyone print with that, you could give it a go maybe?
Great video. Keep up the good work.
Hdpe doesn't really stick to anything. It's very slippery. Getting a surface to print on would be a tough go.
Trying to print HDPE is a tale as old as time. People see that nobody prints HDPE, they spend months trying to print HDPE, they get terrible results because HDPE doesn't even want to stick to itself and they quit with no results besides maybe a vaguely benchy-shaped booger. All the qualities that make HDPE one of the best plastics for injection molding also make it terrible for 3D printing.
HDPE is not printable. It's from the same family of materials as Teflon. It doesn't stick to anything, nothing sticks to it, and it's incredibly toxic when heated. You don't want any of those properties in a home printing machine.
It's very nice to machine into shape and it works in injection molds very conveniently BECAUSE it doesn't stick to anything.
But it's one of the worst thermoplastics you could suggest from the ones commonly used in consumer products.
@@SquintyGears It's not related to Teflon. It's not fluorinated. Low surface energy polymers are not per se unprintable in principle. PP is printable. Though i can see how HDPE in particular could be an issue specifically due to extreme molecular weight, because without a free end in sight, it may take a silly amount of heat to try to tangle two chunks together, so either very slow printing or very high ambient temperature. To solve bed adhesion, i would try printing first layer of PETG and building an HDPE print on top, but that won't solve layer to layer cohesion.
Why do you have an engine hoist? Can we expect a car channel or what? 😅
You don't?
PET bottles ofc!!! :D these take the most amount of space in a regular household.
For your contaminated PLA material you can try using The density of the material as a separation method, or you can use some sort of solvent to melt out the ABS
2:59 Nice Pulp Fiction reference :D
I've seen this machine it's a beauty
For drying your ground plastic you might want to integrate some sort of agitator or stirrer into your drying setup
I'm surprised you didn't use acetyle to check if a spool is ABS. Not quite sure if other plastics dissolve in it as well as ABS but it's usually a good way to check.
When manufacturers recycle their own material, they can adjust the additives to make it run like new.
Most of the spools I find on my filaments these days are cardboard. I keep having to print inserts so the cardboard spools will roll smoothly and not get paper fibers everywhere.
These 3devo machines are really nice, but probably out of the price range of most people at $17K for the filament maker and $18K for the shredder. Would only make sense for a business.
I would like to see you play a bit more with Ps spools, maybe add some cirgin PS or HIPS material in the mix. PS spools are the most common ones so it would be interesting to see.
Would have loved to ask stephan to lend you his filament extruder to compare it to this machine
make tungsten petg or pla like prusa
I'd love to see some torture tests done with the recycled filament.
sure you can! :) just need to chop it, melt it, and stretch it ;) recycling is cool
Volle Rollen in Pellets umzuwandeln ist einfacher. Man kann die einfach fördern lassen und mit einem Aufsatz auf einem Akuschrauber regelmäßig abschneiden
You can buy tungsten powder which would make some very heavy filament, not sure what it would be good for though lol.
Excellent Video Thomas.
Fibers and compunds would be very interesting. PP GF?
Print a printer, use the printed printer to print another, shred the first one into recycled filament and use it to print a new one on the second printer. Repeat until failure.
Most people are NEVER going to be able to afford a setup like this which is understood. I'm also far too lazy to build one of the open source designs. What I would just like in the interest of recycling is just a home version of the grinder so I can melt the grinds down into sheets and use them on my CNC to make other products. This would make me happy.
How about the Buzzkill shredder? A printed housing, a steel ruler, a drill as a motor, and a router bit as the cutter, a couple bearings and standard hardware. This is a very easy build right, or is that too much work as well?
@@SianaGearz i don't know what a buzzkill shredder is, or am i missing something?
@@atienne_navarre A compact (almost hand-held) shredder for 3d prints, designed by someone who calls themselves buzzkill, which is completely made from a 3D printed housing and common parts. The router bit does the shredding, with a piece of steel ruler as the mating surface. Very simple and easy build.
Try to recycle PET from bottles! I’m really curious how that would work
The real friends were the microplastics we breathed along the way
A nice PET spool would be great from plastic bottles.
"ABS" is pretty much a generic mystery material of whatever proprietary individual components the original manufacturer decides to use. Like "PLA+".
Who knows what and what proportions of materials it actually has in it.
What about PET bottles shredded up and mixed with PETG filament?
Are you able to try some other additives, say carbon fibre or glass filled filaments?
I have 76 spools of 3mm spools. 😅. Collecting dust since all my printers even the lulzbot got switched to 1.75
Would running the bad mix in liquid centrifuge (a big bowl or even kiddie pool, with something maintaining the whirlpool) for a while help separate the different types of materials? Would the temperature of the liquid matter much? And what about trying different liquids and mixes (water and salt, water and alcohol etc) to find ratios where specific types float a others sink?
(I imagine it's gonna be a pain to filter the water or whatever liquid after you're done though, so keep that in mind)
edit: Or how about just running it dry on one of those scientific test-tube centrifuges, with enough heat to let things get soft enough to stratify?
edit2: And do the different plastics react differently to strong static electricity? Might be worth testing how the powder behaves with a Van der Graaff generator or something of the sort; though, beware they might end up aerosolized...
they should just make all the spools from PLA. So they can actually just sell refills and put a price on the spools.
Someone is bound to suggest Tom's hair so...;-)
You should grind down soda bottles.
I would love to see you try this with filament poo
Can it handle flexible materials?
How fast it extrudes 1kg of filament and do you can extrude fiber materials?
Could you do test of how many meters of filament it can produce in 24 hours?
The extruder alone is cheapest option to buy for 7k EUR without VAT and with mandatory 1.5k EUR onboarding fee.
It looks like something you would buy for an actual lab or R&D department not really for hobbyist.
Too bad the spools didn't really work. Would have been fun to turn recycled spools into a Masterspool.
But if you make your spools into filament, what will you spool the filament onto 🤣
can you use cured 3d resin material? say rafts and supports, maybe even calibration pieces (i would hope people let em set out in the sun to cure at minimum before discarding or attempting to reuse)
That is thermoset and doesn't melt. It only goes a little soft. So you could potentially grind it down into fine powder and then use that as filler, but i don't think the outcome will have a good cohesion. Might be worth a try?
Polycarbonate+ABS filament
Cool to see but clearly not for the hobbiest. DIY plastic extruders are still the way to keep costs low. I managed to make one for around 300 bucks, and the tutorial is on Instructables if anyone is interested.
*$300AU
6:13 wouldn't have that been an ideal use-case for one of those drill powered pelletizers that eats up old filament and spits out pellets?
Also for the life of me I can't understand how manufacturers of any filaments aren't drawing it through some sort of
Use it to print a filter that filters out microplastics so they don't get in your balls.
Combine PA/CF with a small amount of PLA
Complete the circle by printing a new empty spool
For only $27,000 this setup can be yours too. LOL Sorry, I meant $30,000
I would love to see you destroy the machines
wow a lot of maquinarias
A cardboard spool is a tie breaker between quality filament makers for me.
Wdym? Cardboard good or bad? And why so?
@@polstuff8959 cardboard spools are good because they go in the recycling bin and are sustainable materials. If I have two filaments in front of me of equal quality, I will opt for the one with a cardboard spool. 🙂
I'm surprised the shredder doesn't warm the plastic prior to munching it . PLA would soften considerably with little extra power used.
You don't want soft particles in a shredder at all.
Mixing fresh polymer with the recycled stuff is pretty much how everyone does it. No shame in it.
Uhmm.... I dont think this works with the cardboard spools right?
Nylon tyraps
I hate pointless advertorial videos like this one.
please print HDPE!
It seems every time a youtuber tries to recycle failed 3dprints into new filament it always ends in failure no matter how pricey the machinery they used is.
Guys please... just give up on this dumb endeavor, no one here will be buying this 3devo machine to recycle their failed benchy's
"recycle" PVC pipes
WAY TOO HAZARDOUS.