Ask anyone with a 3D printer what they make the most. They’ll probably say “trash.” There are extra pieces, stuff that oozes out of the extruder, support material, parts that didn’t stick to the bed, or just parts that needed a little tweaking to get right. No matter what you do, you are going to wind up with a lot of scraps. It would be great if you could recycle all this, and [3D Printing Nerd] looks at the FelFil Evo Filament extruder that promises it can do just that. You can see the video below.
As you’d expect, the device is a motorized auger that extrudes filament through a hot end not dissimilar to your printer’s hot end. You have to run a bag of special material through it first to clean out the plastic path. After that, you can create filament from standard pellets or pieces of old plastic.
The device didn’t work right away. Turns out a wire was loose inside. After that, how did it work? Watch the video and find out.
We will say, it is very slow and you can’t run the machine for very long periods of time to prevent overheating. It also wasn’t clear to us how you’d keep the filament neat as it comes out. The video never shows using shredded up plastic parts, either, but you’d think that wouldn’t work any better than the pellets.
As a gadget, the idea of a filament extruder is pretty cool. For recycling, it is a great idea. However, with filament relatively cheap and readily available, any desktop filament extruder is going to have to work pretty well to win a lot of users.
We’ve seen homebrew extruders, of course. Some of these are pretty inexpensive and use common parts. So if you wanted to experiment yourself, there isn’t much to stop you.
Source:: Hackaday