This nachine is being used in Kenya to introduced 3d printing and recycling of plastic. Igor's dedication to assisting people is greatly impacted the introduction to this technology in Africa, demistifying 3d printing and also how to make filament. Igor the 🐐
These look really good. Had they been around a year ago I may have actually invested in one but truth be told I had a very enjoyable time building my own. One of my goals was to spend as little as possible to get as close as possible to "free filament" and the only parts I actually purpose bought were the bearings for the cutter and the temperature control for the heater. Other than that everything was made from repurposed items. i used an old 12V cordless drill I was going to throw out, a converted ATX power supply, a PWM dimmer from an LED light and some smaller bearings I salvaged from an old RC truck I had saved parts from. All told I have $12 invested into it...but WAY more than that in time. It was a fun project. Designing something, breaking it, redesigning and figuring out what works and what doesn't. Now I have a really good working system (although it is pig ugly) and I can regularly get free bottles from the recycling at work. I also inflate the bottles and found that 20psi is perfect. I put the valve end in a cordless drill to turn it slowly while heating with a heat gun. This stretches the bottle slightly and helps really smooth them out which makes for much better filament.
I use a Schrader valve in a bottle cap, lightly pressurize the bottle, then put the Schrader valve in a drill, turning it slowly while heating with the heat gun. Makes for a consistent smoothing without risking shrinkage of the PET.
I live in an apartment complex in the United States. A lot of people here put very little effort into recycling. For me, this machine is an excellent resource. Every day after work, I can just pick a bottle out of the dumpster at my apartment and process it into filament.
7 місяців тому+15
Thank you so very much for bringing this PET recycling process into 3D printable filament to public attention. I have been using rPET made in this way with the Recreator3D project developed by Joshua Taylor, as a teaching project with my students and, if tuned properly, it can be a source of material for inexpensive projects. The students bring a PET bottle to class and leave with a useful part, like for instance some simple lab material. This isn't meant to replace bulk recycling done by our municipality, but just as a way to raising awareness for the problem of disposable plastic and the usefulness of such materials.
As a teacher, you may actually know the answer to this; Is it actually feasible? I assume most countries got a decent recycling system in place, like here in Denmark. Given the offset in CO2/pollution by making the machine in the first place, the overall possible reduction in it (basically only from no transport-pollution?) would be somewhat countered by lower efficiency and the fact that the cut off waste wouldn't end in the pure PET/bottle system, so in terms of environmental effects, how many kg before reaching a green positive?
20 днів тому+1
@VikingRul3s thank you for your input. I do realize that this process diverts PET from recycling, but we are struggling with changing attitudes towards recycling at the moment. Only a fraction of PET plastic is put into recycling here in Portugal.
You're most welcome. I see, that's a shame! Then you're definitely using it in a great way, regardless if the machine itself will reach green positive, I can't hold anything against that 👍 You're facing a not unfamiliar problem. Our first solution was to add a deposit for each bottle (soda/beer etc.), high enough that people cared. That only solved the problem until everything came in PET. Current solution is a dual system, deposits so bottles purchased "on the go" doesn't get thrown in nature and then a designated plastic garbage 240L "can" at each home/apartment (gets picked up once per month) This has had a profound effect and most of the plastics we see in nature now, is wrapping from firms, building renovation etc.
I have a lot of experience with PET filament. I've made my own machine and went through many iterations and improvements. I do not understand how the machine in the video can be sold for $200. It doesn't come assembled, and you can easily find designs for such machines online and in fact some that are much better. From the video isn't obvious, but I think that the guy is using a standard 3D printer nozzle that is drilled. This in my experience is a huge mistake. While making my machine, I saw somewhere a guy using a brass bolt. I tried it and results are much better because the constricted portion of the filament path can be longer (around 10mm) and thus allow the plastic to take the new shape better. My filament comes out completely circular, completely transparent and you can print without adjusting the flow and you wouldn't even notice a difference since the gap in the middle is so small because I feed the widest strip possible. Second huge mistake is the filament cutter, those are terrible! Get a bearing cutter, it is silent and cuts the plastic way more precisely without that much effort. For anyone interested, you can find much more information on this topic on Russian forums. Also the filament splicer I haven't checked but I am pretty sure it is a Russian design or heavily inspired by it.
Yes you are correct but there is even better solution than bolt, 1.7mm MIG copper nozzle. Easily available, very long melt zone. Also bearing cutter is much better than blade cutter.
IMO, the biggest value here would be filament welder. I made my own machine and had no problems printing, but welding and spooling has been an issue. You can easily weld the two filaments, but the weld is brittle and too stiff and it either jams (if you make it too thick) or breaks (if you try and make it thinner). Also, spooling tends to not work as the filament tends to spring back. But the actual pulltrusion is not hard and like you said there are cheaper and better solutions. Bearing cutter being superior in every way, for example.
@@MatheusFP104 check out petamentor. It's free and open source and cheap to make. I didn't make that one, but it seems solid. The guy also produces kits and even finished machines.
I found that the simplest way to get the bottles round is to put a a few ml's of water inside, tighten the cap about 2/3 of the way down and then sit the bottle on its side in the microwave for 3-5 minutes. Once the bottle expands, take it out with an insulated mitt, undo the cap all the way with another insulated mitt and the quickly spray cold water into the bottle, being sure to to hit every side so that you can bring the plastic down well below the temp at which it easily experiences plastic deformation. I've been doing this for a few years as part of another process, and I like it because it self-regulates temperature so that it never gets hot enough to melt through the walls of the bottles, and if you're doing a lot of bottles, you can start with a warm kettle to bring the microwave times down to
This is an insanely cool setup... BUT... Good lord this is a LOT of work to get a little filament. I'm gonna have to be honest, I don't think this is for me... BUT, I might have to try PET filament with my shredder and extruder combo... if I ever finish it... and see if that's easier :) Thanks for another great video Michael!
7 місяців тому+2
PET recycling from bottles, by shredding and extruding, seems to be quite a challenge, particularly in terms of consistency of filament diameter. It takes a new shredding step in order to get pellets of about the same size, that can be fed into the extruder again. Good luck with your project! We are excited to learn about the next developments!
@ One could simplify the process by using a pulltrusion system with suboptimal quality and then shred those strands, but that's most of the way there to a good pulltrusion machine already, and may be a bit cyclically redundant.
Thank you for showing this machine. I just placed an order for the PET Welder & Mr Winder. I am excited to get building this as I have a bunch of small left over spool filament.
I'm glad solutions like this have been created by people, but I think it should be the drink bottle manufacturers who are required to take these bottles back and handle all the cleanup and recycling of them. I've drastically reduced my use of items that come in PET bottles simple because it's too much waste for my liking. If it were easier to get the labels off and make sure the bottles were cleaned I'd probably do this myself. But since I rarely have these bottles in my house I don't think I'd get much use out of the pulltrusion device. I may pick up the welder & winder though! I have a ton of ends of rolls that I really want to weld together.
Of course it'd be better if the manufacturer would have to deal with the bottles at the end of their live. But unfortunately no one ever bothered making that actually their responsibility. Only recently there's even been talks about starting that, so we're still at least 10 years off from that being the case. Until then it's up to folks like Tylman to figure things out that can work as a "bandaid" for the time being. The filament welder being a great piece for this, as the short amounts of bottle filament so far were the biggest reason to not bother in the first place. As for getting the labels off, IF the label is made from paper, all that's needed is to soak them in dish soap'ed water. After a couple hours the label literally falls off on it's own. And the non-paper labels, at least over here in Germany, are usually not completely glued but basically just "tacked" together and to the bottle at the seam. So there's only a little ripping needed and some wiping after with something that dissolves the glue. I tend to use lighter fuel. If they're plastic though and thoroughly glued to the bottle, then yeah, that's basically a middle finger from the manufacturer for this case... But I can't say that those are common over here. At least not with soda bottles as far as I know.
I have made the Pulltruder from recreator 3d and a soon as I watched this video I ordered the joiner and MR Winder they are due to arrive later today. Cant wait to make it and start to join the hundreds of lengths of pet I have produced with the Pulltruder.
Great review. I like the sentiment and this seems really well made. Having just weighed the usable portion of a 2L bottle and running the numbers... to produce 1kg of filament, at best I'm looking at *around* 45 bottles, 90 hours of pultrusion, 4.5 kWh of electricity, £1.13 added to my electric bill. Considering the time and effort, I'll pay for the convenience of readymade rolls and just hope my local council aren't dumping my empty bottles in landfill.
This did at least prompt me to research how good my province is at recycling bottles. Turns out, it's very good. But I agree, this is a hobbyist's toy (which is *fine* , I spend a lot of time and money on hobby projects that are little more than toys), not an economically practical solution.
Interesting machines, I think the real winner here is actually that automatic filament splicer and winder. The splicer is just really useful to have for a printfarm or makerspace that uses a lot of the same filaments whether or not they have a recycling setup especially for the really expensive filament. To really tap that market, the splicer would need to be able to hit the much higher temperatures required to be able to melt the really expensive engineering filaments like PEEK or Ultem. If the current design for the splicer can't do that, maybe a specialized version could be made for that, probably using a fair bit of metal for the parts close to the heat and extra heat shielding and cooling capability.
At first I thought that it's a cool idea for having a "free" filament from recycled bottles. Then it hit me. I'd have to make a $300 plus investment for the hardware first. The filament in my country costs $12-15. So it's ~25 kg of filament. I don't think I would use such amount in 10 years...
In EU the problem of pet bottles has been resolved (almost). It's not even feasable to do this. Every bottle has an extra recycling tax embeded in it's price witch you receive back when you recycle it. And every large store is obligated to have a recycling machine. So almost all pet bottles get recycled in an industrial maner, wich is way more efficient than any diy solution
Even outside Europe this stuff makes no sense, considering expenses and time, let's be honest. It's not the tax which makes the difference
7 місяців тому+8
I live in Europe and my country has no PET return process or tax/incentive for recycling it. This rPET filament making process can, however, be used in small scale as means of raising public awareness for the problems of plastic disposal and the importance of recycling. I believe this project fulfills this objective and it's not meant for large scale.
EU guidelines require countries to make sure a percentage of PET is recycled, I think countries are free to choose how to do this. Where I live it's through a deposit on the bottles.
This isn’t really feasible in countries that don’t recycle PET either. The yield is very low and the effort is very high, it is in no way economical or even remotely practical unless you go through lots of bottles
I have been printing with PET for the last 2 years and I don't see myself buying filament anymore. My tip for you is to easy the wining process. PET tends to unroll as soon as it is loose. Just tie it in a small roll and put in an oven at 80C for 15 minutes and let it cools slowly. It will relax and keep the rolled shape. If you don't have an oven you can use, just let it sit on the printer bed at 80C, covered with a cardboard box.
Have you seen the Slunaz FF1R filament welder? It was available on Kickstarter and I was one of the backers. It’s totally automated and for doing PET, it’s perfect! It’s made my task of processing a lot of small bottles became SO much easier and the welds it makes are perfect and sized so that they slide thru the PTFE tube and extruder just like commercial filament.
7 місяців тому+2
Thank you for bringing Slunaz project to out attention.
PET can be recycled and re-used near infinitely, unlike different types of plastic. As a printing target, this makes it very attractive, in that it is easily recycled. But given this, a machine that extrudes from pellets or ground scrap is more desirable than extruding from a strip derived from a bottle -- it's arguably simpler, and ensures the material can be recycled more than once.
While pet can be recycled infinitely, this does not apply to DIY stuff. It takes an industrial process to increase the melt viscosity, because with each heat cycle the material becomes less viscous (going from honey consistency to water) I still love pet for 3d prints but we have to be realistic. Also creating good filament from pet pellets is ridiculously hard. I've printed more pet material through a pellet printer than I've exteuded good filament, and I've tried extruding the filament for years
@@BelviGER Thank you for the additional context. What are the requirements to maintain the melt viscosity of recycled PET? This is a very interesting topic.
@SeanLumly high temperature(200-210c) no moisture, no oxygen via either vacuum, nitrogen, or mixture of both, and keep it like that for 10-20 hours It's also an exothermic reaction
@@BelviGER This seems involved, but unless I'm missing something, perhaps not out of the range of the enthusiast with access to (or the ability to mill) a valved metal container capable of withstanding vacuum, and a desktop kiln. And presumably this would only need to be employed when viscosity becomes an issue.
I used PET for the past 1,5 years in various diy projects. It shows clear signs of degradation (brittleness and discoloration) after heating it a couple of times in normal atmosphere.
What an amazing product!! You always say you don’t have patience…I call BS on that😂 I would have like to hear you talk about the distinctive advantages of PET. The whole food safe factor is wild. I’m not saying a 3d print would be safe, with all of its nooks and cranny’s. That’s not saying some kind of chemical smoothing wouldn’t be good. 🇦🇺🤜🏼🤛🏼😎🍀🍀🍀☮️
silly thing, if you have sunflower cooking oil, rub a bit on the stickers on the bottles, it soaks through the paper of the sticker, and turns the glue to a kind of a non sticky liquid gel that just wipes off.
I don't buy many drink bottles, so the PET cutter doesn't interest me that much, but the Welder and Winder is something I could definitely use. Very elegant, and while probably not the cheapest option out there, definitely seems like the easiest.
Nice video. Honestly I'm more interested in the welder-winder combination than trying to recycle the PET bottles directly - all of American Cascadia has curbside recycling for PET, and our programme is pretty good. (Which is not to say anything bad about the device, this looks really good particularly for the price they're offering, and well doen to them and good luck to those who want this approach, I applaud it.) But that winder and joiner, on the other hand - I'm terrible at filament welding and that looks _tasty_.
Remember that in Australia technically, it's illegal to do mains-rated wiring unless you're licensed. This includes wiring inside equipment and home-made projects.
Default flow rate is low because of the air bubble generated in the middle of the PET straw. I use CHT nozzle, which fills the void with its core increasing the flow rate up to 10-12 mm3/s.
I wish there was a filament machine that could do this in 2 stages where it goes from pulltrusion to normal extruded filament so it is a solid filament strand instead of a rolled one.
Interesting devices, I'm glad to see recycling is moving along in the right direction. Oh, btw, what model of Vise Grip wire strippers are you using in this video, I need to get a pair and Vice Grip/Irwin is a good brand.
Sadly (in context of this video, or happily if you're an environmentalist) the chain for recycling PET bottles here has been working fine for over 30 years, for every bottle you buy you pay a small collateral (around €0.25 each) that you get back when you return it empty, it works quite well and they recently also introduced it for smaller (0.5L) bottles and aluminium cans, so it's way more cost-effective to just return the bottles and use the money to buy a roll of filament as well of the more energy efficient use of doing recycling in large scale. But for countries without such a system and that still have tons of plastic bottles everywhere this seems like a great idea to start re-using this waste instead of just dumping it on a landfill or into the sea.
It's not for me, but this looks like a well-thought-out solution. I'd like to see that pullstrusion process doubled up, with one bottle being stripped clockwise and another anticlockwise.
I've bought one and got to say it's not only increased in price but it's a huge deal breaker when the files don't even open correctly its a fantastic idea but the hoops you have to jump through is just not worth it since if you've never done something like this before then I'd have to say look elsewhere, however if the printed files required had its own manual and everything was straightforward definitely would change my mind at the moment its over-complicated and too expensive for what its trying to achieve as the price does include shipping and tax where im from in the uk so it ended being very expensive for what it is!
Recycling plastic for 3d printing would be so much easier with pellet printers. Have you looked into any of these out there? There's another UA-camr developing a consumer grade pellet extruder that looks promising, so you should really look into it since all you have to do is shred and dry used material to recycle instead of all this work just to use bottles. Really worth looking into.
Recently there were some Shorts featuring a printer add-on that sits before the extruder and directly converts PET strips into filament as the printer needs it, but last I checked the uploader has refused to elaborate beyond the visual demonstration.
When I can I think I'll get this setup. When I learned that the filament is hollow I got to thinking if it would be possible to fill it in with a thinner slice of bottle. Particularly of a different color. I've seen some beautiful blue ones at the grocery. A clear sleeve over a translucent core would be rather interesting. I'm also wondering if it would be possible to make a custom hotend/nozzle to make my own bi/tri-color petgs because there doesn't seem to be a good selection like there is of pla. Taking bought spools and running them through this setup to get a new spool is what I'm getting at.
Interesting about the filament shape 5:45... You know, you test adding a core to the filament 🤔 like glass fibers, or graphene, or another plastic to change the behaviour of the end product... 🎉
I'd gladly jump on this if Finland hadn't already solved the recycling issue lol. You pay extra in the form of a deposit for every plastic, glass and metal bottle/can that is returnable. You can return them to nearly any convenience store and get your money back. The amount of money is significant enough that making filament out of them would be somewhat financially detrimental. There is also no enviromental incentive for me personally to recycle the material, since my country already has a great infrastructure in place to do so.
LOVE the Chopped shirt! Was the 180% flow for the smaller filament a guess? And did you find a solution for if you ended up with filament that is too big? I am struggling with consistency and finding a solution that will work with a larger tolerance than the +/- .02 that you get with store bought filaments.
I'm thinking of making a filament machine of this type, but I run into the problem that there doesn't seem to be a 1.75mm extruder nozzle for sale that would be perfect to make
Don't get a nozzle. Get a brass bolt, drill it with a 1.7mm drill bit and make the heated portion around 10mm. On the entrance drill the bolt with a larger bit to make a smooth chamfer. This will give you the best result.
@@EderRSW My Recreator3D MK5 just uses the standard hotend from an Ender 3. I drilled the .4mm brass nozzle out to 1.7mm, then carefully wobbled the bit until the hole was just big enough to slide in a bit of commercially made filament (verify is 1.75mm). Then using some small countersink and smooth step bits, I funneled out the back of the nozzle and the aluminum heat block. This makes it easy to feed the thin narrow end of the PET ribbon into the back of the block and out of the nozzle so you can grab it with a pliers to get it started.
The prices are extremely expensive for something that can be put together with much less money. There are plans of different machines available all over the Internet.
Everything has a cost and nothing is free. If it is, then you have to spend your time. For some of us, our time is far more valuable than the cost of a solution. Nobody is forcing you to buy anything.
Been interested in filament recycling recently and this might end up being the kit I go with. I just have a few questions such as the essentials kit comes with ALL of the hardware and all i would need to do is print and assemble everything? and would PETG be good enough to print with for the machines?
7 місяців тому
I have build two projects similar to this one, Recreator3D and PETamentor, and you can definitely print the parts out of PETG. Just note that this recycled PET is quite labor and time consuming and the yield is quite small, per bottle. On the plus side, rPET is quite sturdy and suitable for funcional parts.
I don't accumulate enough PET bottles for this to be an option. But I send all my waste PLA to a filament recycling company, where I can directly buy recycled PLA - Haven't bought new PLA in ages.
Are you going to do a review of the Carvera Air? I'm quite interested since I missed the early bird original Carvera and it turns out the released one _was_ actually more expensive, so I have a bit of fomo now with the little brother which is even more affordable. I'd love to see your maker perspective especially to balance out between the first timer "Wow! thats amazing I can do it at home!" and the actual machine shop worker "That doesnt chuck 3 tons of steel per week, so useless". FWIW this time I made sure to get one of the super early birds 😁
About one and a half year ago, I've got my first 3D printer - Anet A8! (Seriously. It was a first place prize on RoboFinist 2022). I had A LOT of problems with this printer, and recently it stoped heating. Seems like either extruder MOSFET burned, or the ATMega got partially damaged. People say, that the only way to fix it, is to get a new motherboard, but I think, it's time for a new printer. Kinda want to try making a filament exturder out of my AnetA8
Probably still need a new board for it but I'd recommend something quick and cheap like the SKR mini E3 or even a second hand OEM Ender 3 board. An MKS Tinybee board could work too but people have had mixed results with that board. It doesn't even need to have the latest firmware either. A 3D printer can be repurposed as a pulstruder as long as it can run an extruder motor. From there, just attach that motor to a pulstruder instead and feed it gcode to just "extrude" filament. A rather boring job for something that still thinks it's a 3D printer lol
My feeling is that the prices of the equipment are fair for what they do, given that they'll be small-scale manufacturing for the kits. However, I seriously doubt there's any real economic value in the process. Ignoring the cost of the labour involved in using this (which, if I'm being honest, is almost certainly a deal-breaker in and of itself) and in building this (which I'm willing to do because the building part would be fairly fun, I think), there's still the really long time needed to recoup costs. Getting the full combo will cost me 476$ CAD, shipped. I can buy PETG locally for around 22$ CAD. So I'd need to generate over 21.5 kg of PET before I broke even. But the math isn't done yet. The internet tells me that a 2L pop bottle is around 40 to 50g of plastic, as of 2009. (It may be even less now, as there's been a *lot* of work put into reducing the input costs of things like pop bottles.) You didn't say this explicitly but the video suggests that the very tops and bottoms aren't usable. So if we assume that the bottle weighs 50g and 80% of that mass is usable, I'm getting 40g of filament per bottle. That means I need almost 540 2L bottles to make enough filament to break even. But... in Canada, I pay a 20 cent deposit when I buy that bottle, and if I don't return it to a recycling depot I'm out that money. 20 cents each on 540 bottles is 108$ in lost recycling fees... which is another 4kg of PET I need to recover that cost, Which is another 100 bottles. Which is another 20$ in lost recycling fees, so another kilo of PET I need, which is another 25 bottles and 5$ in recycling fees, and now I'm tired of doing this math so let's just say that's like 10 more bottles to get enough PET to cover all those fees. So 540 + 100 + 25 + 10 = 675 bottles. I go through 1 to 2 2L pop bottles a week. Even at the high end of consumption, that works out to 337.5 weeks or about 6.5 *years* before I generate enough pop bottles to *recover my cost*. And I honestly don't see most people managing it much faster, because even for folks who go through more PET than I do this is a *very* labour intensive process. I feel like it would be a minimum of 2 years to recover the costs. And you aren't even having a huge impact on the environment, because recycling PET at scale is something *we know how to do.* Granted that I live in Alberta, which apparently is a world leader in this, and so there will be other jurisdictions that don't do nearly as good a job of dealing with waste PET. (83% of plastic bottles sold in Alberta get recycled, the internet tells me, compared with 60% in US states were there's a cost to the consumer and a measly 24% in US states where there's no bottle deposit) Someone living in such a place might well be able to make a measurable difference, at least on their own personal waste level. But realistically - PET is a materiel that can easily be dealt with in volume and at scale and the path to reducing plastic bottle waste is to picket your local government until they spend some money on recycling programs, not doing it yourself to make 3d printing material. So this was really cool and a fun video and if the welder had existed in 2018 I might even have bought it (but now I don't *have* random ends of spools because I just let them run out in my X1C; even if I get the timing wrong the printer will sit there until I get home from work so I'm only losing time and a tiny amount of electricity). But there's just no use case here beyond "I want to be able to say I made this thing from a plastic bottle." Like any other home-recycling idea, the labour and equipment costs are just too high, and it will never be worth it. Recycling is a task that needs to be done at large volume, not in individual homes.
I feel like the 10c deposit shouldn't be the main factor in the machine paying for itself. Assuming your hobby time spent to process the plastic isn't worth much money to you, it'll slowly convert your free time into a cheap prototype material. It would take a lot of plastic bottles to get even a single kilogram out, but if online shopping is the fastest way to get filament in your area, it could even be the fastest way to get a very small amount of filament.
Not really interested in PET bottle filament due to them being easily recyclable here. But I do like the filament joiner idea. However the joins didnt look that great, id really love a dedicated filament joiner that actually worked! I have so many leftover spools.
This has been around for a few years now, I have made my own machine using an Arduino, have not bothered with joining as I have a smart run out sensor..... I used a few parts from jrtd3d...... Anything less than a 1L bottle is just not worth it.....
Question around that mains wiring, if one was to hypothetically have a voron, are there any actual electricians who would even bother to check it out for you as a job? It is hard enough to get any tradie to do something regular properly, let alone something outside of the box in Australia.
ive seen something to this with in the last couple of years, using an old ender 3 board i had it still used some presliced gcode, and i see some similar resemblence to it, just a few differences, i did not like how the machine worked, and ended up tearing the machine part, luckily i only had a few bucks in it, that was just frame peices, printed parts, and a sacrafical mk8 heat block, alo i made a few caps with tire valves pumped them up, and using a drill, would spin the bottle as well as a heat gun to get a uniform thickness it may have just been my setup, and some parts did break on me, but givven the nature of pete it is hard to process cuz of its issues with water vapor making it very brittle, though would make strong prints
i definetly like the ittiration and the steps further thats been taken with, it seen several things similar lately with automated joiners and winders really cool, and really is not too expensive compared to some other designs out there
While I don't doubt that it's a good machine, $200 to pulstrude PET seems quite a bit of a steep price to me. I built Function3D's pulstruder for probably less than a quarter of that and used far less filament to print the parts for it. That's just my two cents, YMMV. A cheap or unused 3D printer board (just needs to process very, very basic gcode), power supply, 1 stepper motor, hotend components and a simple screen and you're in business. I can see some good use in the filament joiner though.
7 місяців тому
Still, you have to give credit to de designer for all the modeling and software/testing, plus quite a good work put into manuals. Considering the sourcing of the parts as well, I believe 200$ is a fair price.
I'm all for recycling, but this not only looks like a nightmare, but an expensive nightmare. Both for the kit, and the amount of time it will cost you.
This tech makes sense for one use case - you cannot afford filament. Poor college students maybe? Kids with too much free time? Third world countries that have lots of PET bottles literally littered everywhere but cannot get filament cheaply shipped to their country would benefit from this type of system.
pet is one of the few plastics that are actually recycled, it's bit sad to see it scraped to make 3d prints that very probably won't be recycled
7 місяців тому+1
This rPET filament making process can be used in small scale as means of raising public awareness for the problems of plastic disposal and the importance of recycling.
This is fantastic. I believe the hobby needs to move away from the RGB-fest of emulating overclocked gaming PC's and towards functional, sustainable open source tech that we can spearhead such that it becomes affordable to all. If this stuff got half the attention that making dime-a-dozen busts of marvel characters in silk chromatic PLA did then I would be very happy.
For me this is not viable at all. How many PETG rolls can I buy for just the price of all of this? Too much trouble to have nothing in return except wasted time and energy. The idea is cool, but the actual solution does not fit the purpose.
This nachine is being used in Kenya to introduced 3d printing and recycling of plastic. Igor's dedication to assisting people is greatly impacted the introduction to this technology in Africa, demistifying 3d printing and also how to make filament. Igor the 🐐
These look really good. Had they been around a year ago I may have actually invested in one but truth be told I had a very enjoyable time building my own. One of my goals was to spend as little as possible to get as close as possible to "free filament" and the only parts I actually purpose bought were the bearings for the cutter and the temperature control for the heater. Other than that everything was made from repurposed items. i used an old 12V cordless drill I was going to throw out, a converted ATX power supply, a PWM dimmer from an LED light and some smaller bearings I salvaged from an old RC truck I had saved parts from. All told I have $12 invested into it...but WAY more than that in time. It was a fun project. Designing something, breaking it, redesigning and figuring out what works and what doesn't. Now I have a really good working system (although it is pig ugly) and I can regularly get free bottles from the recycling at work. I also inflate the bottles and found that 20psi is perfect. I put the valve end in a cordless drill to turn it slowly while heating with a heat gun. This stretches the bottle slightly and helps really smooth them out which makes for much better filament.
I use a Schrader valve in a bottle cap, lightly pressurize the bottle, then put the Schrader valve in a drill, turning it slowly while heating with the heat gun. Makes for a consistent smoothing without risking shrinkage of the PET.
I do this as well.
Я вообще не нагреваю бутылку перед разрезанием. Это лишнее. Подшипниковым бутылкорезом она режется без лишних действий.
I live in an apartment complex in the United States. A lot of people here put very little effort into recycling. For me, this machine is an excellent resource. Every day after work, I can just pick a bottle out of the dumpster at my apartment and process it into filament.
Thank you so very much for bringing this PET recycling process into 3D printable filament to public attention. I have been using rPET made in this way with the Recreator3D project developed by Joshua Taylor, as a teaching project with my students and, if tuned properly, it can be a source of material for inexpensive projects. The students bring a PET bottle to class and leave with a useful part, like for instance some simple lab material. This isn't meant to replace bulk recycling done by our municipality, but just as a way to raising awareness for the problem of disposable plastic and the usefulness of such materials.
As a teacher, you may actually know the answer to this; Is it actually feasible? I assume most countries got a decent recycling system in place, like here in Denmark. Given the offset in CO2/pollution by making the machine in the first place, the overall possible reduction in it (basically only from no transport-pollution?) would be somewhat countered by lower efficiency and the fact that the cut off waste wouldn't end in the pure PET/bottle system, so in terms of environmental effects, how many kg before reaching a green positive?
@VikingRul3s thank you for your input. I do realize that this process diverts PET from recycling, but we are struggling with changing attitudes towards recycling at the moment. Only a fraction of PET plastic is put into recycling here in Portugal.
You're most welcome. I see, that's a shame! Then you're definitely using it in a great way, regardless if the machine itself will reach green positive, I can't hold anything against that 👍
You're facing a not unfamiliar problem. Our first solution was to add a deposit for each bottle (soda/beer etc.), high enough that people cared. That only solved the problem until everything came in PET. Current solution is a dual system, deposits so bottles purchased "on the go" doesn't get thrown in nature and then a designated plastic garbage 240L "can" at each home/apartment (gets picked up once per month)
This has had a profound effect and most of the plastics we see in nature now, is wrapping from firms, building renovation etc.
I have a lot of experience with PET filament. I've made my own machine and went through many iterations and improvements. I do not understand how the machine in the video can be sold for $200. It doesn't come assembled, and you can easily find designs for such machines online and in fact some that are much better. From the video isn't obvious, but I think that the guy is using a standard 3D printer nozzle that is drilled. This in my experience is a huge mistake. While making my machine, I saw somewhere a guy using a brass bolt. I tried it and results are much better because the constricted portion of the filament path can be longer (around 10mm) and thus allow the plastic to take the new shape better. My filament comes out completely circular, completely transparent and you can print without adjusting the flow and you wouldn't even notice a difference since the gap in the middle is so small because I feed the widest strip possible. Second huge mistake is the filament cutter, those are terrible! Get a bearing cutter, it is silent and cuts the plastic way more precisely without that much effort. For anyone interested, you can find much more information on this topic on Russian forums. Also the filament splicer I haven't checked but I am pretty sure it is a Russian design or heavily inspired by it.
Yes! Can you pint me in the direction of projects like yours?? Thanks!
Yes you are correct but there is even better solution than bolt, 1.7mm MIG copper nozzle. Easily available, very long melt zone. Also bearing cutter is much better than blade cutter.
IMO, the biggest value here would be filament welder. I made my own machine and had no problems printing, but welding and spooling has been an issue. You can easily weld the two filaments, but the weld is brittle and too stiff and it either jams (if you make it too thick) or breaks (if you try and make it thinner). Also, spooling tends to not work as the filament tends to spring back. But the actual pulltrusion is not hard and like you said there are cheaper and better solutions. Bearing cutter being superior in every way, for example.
@@MatheusFP104 check out petamentor. It's free and open source and cheap to make. I didn't make that one, but it seems solid. The guy also produces kits and even finished machines.
@@MatheusFP104 There's also PETALOT project, IMO even better.
I found that the simplest way to get the bottles round is to put a a few ml's of water inside, tighten the cap about 2/3 of the way down and then sit the bottle on its side in the microwave for 3-5 minutes. Once the bottle expands, take it out with an insulated mitt, undo the cap all the way with another insulated mitt and the quickly spray cold water into the bottle, being sure to to hit every side so that you can bring the plastic down well below the temp at which it easily experiences plastic deformation. I've been doing this for a few years as part of another process, and I like it because it self-regulates temperature so that it never gets hot enough to melt through the walls of the bottles, and if you're doing a lot of bottles, you can start with a warm kettle to bring the microwave times down to
This is an insanely cool setup... BUT... Good lord this is a LOT of work to get a little filament. I'm gonna have to be honest, I don't think this is for me... BUT, I might have to try PET filament with my shredder and extruder combo... if I ever finish it... and see if that's easier :) Thanks for another great video Michael!
PET recycling from bottles, by shredding and extruding, seems to be quite a challenge, particularly in terms of consistency of filament diameter. It takes a new shredding step in order to get pellets of about the same size, that can be fed into the extruder again. Good luck with your project! We are excited to learn about the next developments!
@ One could simplify the process by using a pulltrusion system with suboptimal quality and then shred those strands, but that's most of the way there to a good pulltrusion machine already, and may be a bit cyclically redundant.
Extruding PET at home will be challenging at best because of crystalization.
@@Anonymous-qx5uk Agreed, it starts at 236C already.
The PETAmentor is alot simpler
I was just researching recycling bottles for printing the other day. This is a wonderful concept.
wow the documentation is really very well done.
Indeed, I was quite impressed by that! And people complain that this project costs money!
Thank you for showing this machine. I just placed an order for the PET Welder & Mr Winder. I am excited to get building this as I have a bunch of small left over spool filament.
I'm glad solutions like this have been created by people, but I think it should be the drink bottle manufacturers who are required to take these bottles back and handle all the cleanup and recycling of them. I've drastically reduced my use of items that come in PET bottles simple because it's too much waste for my liking. If it were easier to get the labels off and make sure the bottles were cleaned I'd probably do this myself. But since I rarely have these bottles in my house I don't think I'd get much use out of the pulltrusion device. I may pick up the welder & winder though! I have a ton of ends of rolls that I really want to weld together.
Of course it'd be better if the manufacturer would have to deal with the bottles at the end of their live. But unfortunately no one ever bothered making that actually their responsibility. Only recently there's even been talks about starting that, so we're still at least 10 years off from that being the case.
Until then it's up to folks like Tylman to figure things out that can work as a "bandaid" for the time being. The filament welder being a great piece for this, as the short amounts of bottle filament so far were the biggest reason to not bother in the first place.
As for getting the labels off, IF the label is made from paper, all that's needed is to soak them in dish soap'ed water. After a couple hours the label literally falls off on it's own. And the non-paper labels, at least over here in Germany, are usually not completely glued but basically just "tacked" together and to the bottle at the seam. So there's only a little ripping needed and some wiping after with something that dissolves the glue. I tend to use lighter fuel.
If they're plastic though and thoroughly glued to the bottle, then yeah, that's basically a middle finger from the manufacturer for this case... But I can't say that those are common over here. At least not with soda bottles as far as I know.
I have made the Pulltruder from recreator 3d and a soon as I watched this video I ordered the joiner and MR Winder they are due to arrive later today. Cant wait to make it and start to join the hundreds of lengths of pet I have produced with the Pulltruder.
The Recreator and the community bottle cutter are excellent. Cuts perfect strips every time and doesn't jam
im *super* impressed with the printed results!! Well done, Michael!
When i see that you uploaded a new video, i insta watch it and like it. Love your work man!
I hope to get one of these soon. Thank you for showing it off.
Congrats on 500k subs!!! You deserve it!
Great review. I like the sentiment and this seems really well made. Having just weighed the usable portion of a 2L bottle and running the numbers... to produce 1kg of filament, at best I'm looking at *around* 45 bottles, 90 hours of pultrusion, 4.5 kWh of electricity, £1.13 added to my electric bill. Considering the time and effort, I'll pay for the convenience of readymade rolls and just hope my local council aren't dumping my empty bottles in landfill.
And the sheer amount of manual prep work. I can't believe home brew machines are worth the bother, let alone actually buying one.
This did at least prompt me to research how good my province is at recycling bottles. Turns out, it's very good. But I agree, this is a hobbyist's toy (which is *fine* , I spend a lot of time and money on hobby projects that are little more than toys), not an economically practical solution.
Interesting machines, I think the real winner here is actually that automatic filament splicer and winder. The splicer is just really useful to have for a printfarm or makerspace that uses a lot of the same filaments whether or not they have a recycling setup especially for the really expensive filament. To really tap that market, the splicer would need to be able to hit the much higher temperatures required to be able to melt the really expensive engineering filaments like PEEK or Ultem. If the current design for the splicer can't do that, maybe a specialized version could be made for that, probably using a fair bit of metal for the parts close to the heat and extra heat shielding and cooling capability.
At first I thought that it's a cool idea for having a "free" filament from recycled bottles.
Then it hit me. I'd have to make a $300 plus investment for the hardware first. The filament in my country costs $12-15. So it's ~25 kg of filament. I don't think I would use such amount in 10 years...
In EU the problem of pet bottles has been resolved (almost). It's not even feasable to do this. Every bottle has an extra recycling tax embeded in it's price witch you receive back when you recycle it. And every large store is obligated to have a recycling machine. So almost all pet bottles get recycled in an industrial maner, wich is way more efficient than any diy solution
Even outside Europe this stuff makes no sense, considering expenses and time, let's be honest. It's not the tax which makes the difference
I live in Europe and my country has no PET return process or tax/incentive for recycling it. This rPET filament making process can, however, be used in small scale as means of raising public awareness for the problems of plastic disposal and the importance of recycling. I believe this project fulfills this objective and it's not meant for large scale.
EU guidelines require countries to make sure a percentage of PET is recycled, I think countries are free to choose how to do this.
Where I live it's through a deposit on the bottles.
In the EU, *some countries* have *started* programmes that could resolve the plastic issue. It's far from everywhere and all the way.
This isn’t really feasible in countries that don’t recycle PET either. The yield is very low and the effort is very high, it is in no way economical or even remotely practical unless you go through lots of bottles
I have been printing with PET for the last 2 years and I don't see myself buying filament anymore. My tip for you is to easy the wining process. PET tends to unroll as soon as it is loose. Just tie it in a small roll and put in an oven at 80C for 15 minutes and let it cools slowly. It will relax and keep the rolled shape. If you don't have an oven you can use, just let it sit on the printer bed at 80C, covered with a cardboard box.
Have you seen the Slunaz FF1R filament welder? It was available on Kickstarter and I was one of the backers. It’s totally automated and for doing PET, it’s perfect! It’s made my task of processing a lot of small bottles became SO much easier and the welds it makes are perfect and sized so that they slide thru the PTFE tube and extruder just like commercial filament.
Thank you for bringing Slunaz project to out attention.
Really interesting indeed! Thanks, Michael! 😃
This could help a LOT even with the environment!
Anyway, stay safe there with your family! 🖖😊
Im amazed & inspired! Thank you and Igor so much!
16:00 POLAND MENTIONED RAAAAHHHHHH
PET can be recycled and re-used near infinitely, unlike different types of plastic. As a printing target, this makes it very attractive, in that it is easily recycled. But given this, a machine that extrudes from pellets or ground scrap is more desirable than extruding from a strip derived from a bottle -- it's arguably simpler, and ensures the material can be recycled more than once.
While pet can be recycled infinitely, this does not apply to DIY stuff.
It takes an industrial process to increase the melt viscosity, because with each heat cycle the material becomes less viscous (going from honey consistency to water)
I still love pet for 3d prints but we have to be realistic. Also creating good filament from pet pellets is ridiculously hard. I've printed more pet material through a pellet printer than I've exteuded good filament, and I've tried extruding the filament for years
@@BelviGER Thank you for the additional context. What are the requirements to maintain the melt viscosity of recycled PET?
This is a very interesting topic.
@SeanLumly high temperature(200-210c) no moisture, no oxygen via either vacuum, nitrogen, or mixture of both, and keep it like that for 10-20 hours
It's also an exothermic reaction
@@BelviGER This seems involved, but unless I'm missing something, perhaps not out of the range of the enthusiast with access to (or the ability to mill) a valved metal container capable of withstanding vacuum, and a desktop kiln. And presumably this would only need to be employed when viscosity becomes an issue.
I used PET for the past 1,5 years in various diy projects. It shows clear signs of degradation (brittleness and discoloration) after heating it a couple of times in normal atmosphere.
What an amazing product!!
You always say you don’t have patience…I call BS on that😂
I would have like to hear you talk about the distinctive advantages of PET.
The whole food safe factor is wild. I’m not saying a 3d print would be safe, with all of its nooks and cranny’s.
That’s not saying some kind of chemical smoothing wouldn’t be good.
🇦🇺🤜🏼🤛🏼😎🍀🍀🍀☮️
silly thing, if you have sunflower cooking oil, rub a bit on the stickers on the bottles, it soaks through the paper of the sticker, and turns the glue to a kind of a non sticky liquid gel that just wipes off.
Excellent work presenting this!
What a cool setup. I like it
I don't buy many drink bottles, so the PET cutter doesn't interest me that much, but the Welder and Winder is something I could definitely use. Very elegant, and while probably not the cheapest option out there, definitely seems like the easiest.
Nice video. Honestly I'm more interested in the welder-winder combination than trying to recycle the PET bottles directly - all of American Cascadia has curbside recycling for PET, and our programme is pretty good. (Which is not to say anything bad about the device, this looks really good particularly for the price they're offering, and well doen to them and good luck to those who want this approach, I applaud it.)
But that winder and joiner, on the other hand - I'm terrible at filament welding and that looks _tasty_.
Remember that in Australia technically, it's illegal to do mains-rated wiring unless you're licensed. This includes wiring inside equipment and home-made projects.
I love how ghetto/steampunk it looks
Default flow rate is low because of the air bubble generated in the middle of the PET straw. I use CHT nozzle, which fills the void with its core increasing the flow rate up to 10-12 mm3/s.
Congrats on 500K subs!!
I wish there was a filament machine that could do this in 2 stages where it goes from pulltrusion to normal extruded filament so it is a solid filament strand instead of a rolled one.
Excellent video Michael. I will share on my Socials.
Interesting devices, I'm glad to see recycling is moving along in the right direction. Oh, btw, what model of Vise Grip wire strippers are you using in this video, I need to get a pair and Vice Grip/Irwin is a good brand.
I did this for my high school project.
though mine was completely done by me.
It's quite an ambitious project! Congratulations!
This one isn't for me, but I'm glad that he made it.
Sadly (in context of this video, or happily if you're an environmentalist) the chain for recycling PET bottles here has been working fine for over 30 years, for every bottle you buy you pay a small collateral (around €0.25 each) that you get back when you return it empty, it works quite well and they recently also introduced it for smaller (0.5L) bottles and aluminium cans, so it's way more cost-effective to just return the bottles and use the money to buy a roll of filament as well of the more energy efficient use of doing recycling in large scale.
But for countries without such a system and that still have tons of plastic bottles everywhere this seems like a great idea to start re-using this waste instead of just dumping it on a landfill or into the sea.
It's not for me, but this looks like a well-thought-out solution. I'd like to see that pullstrusion process doubled up, with one bottle being stripped clockwise and another anticlockwise.
THANK YOU
I've bought one and got to say it's not only increased in price but it's a huge deal breaker when the files don't even open correctly its a fantastic idea but the hoops you have to jump through is just not worth it since if you've never done something like this before then I'd have to say look elsewhere,
however if the printed files required had its own manual and everything was straightforward definitely would change my mind at the moment its over-complicated and too expensive for what its trying to achieve as the price does include shipping and tax where im from in the uk so it ended being very expensive for what it is!
This was both awesome and overwhelming to watch 😅
Recycling plastic for 3d printing would be so much easier with pellet printers. Have you looked into any of these out there? There's another UA-camr developing a consumer grade pellet extruder that looks promising, so you should really look into it since all you have to do is shred and dry used material to recycle instead of all this work just to use bottles. Really worth looking into.
@greenboy3d is the UA-camr mentioned.
@@xankersmith9194Yes . Following him closely.
Recently there were some Shorts featuring a printer add-on that sits before the extruder and directly converts PET strips into filament as the printer needs it, but last I checked the uploader has refused to elaborate beyond the visual demonstration.
When I can I think I'll get this setup. When I learned that the filament is hollow I got to thinking if it would be possible to fill it in with a thinner slice of bottle. Particularly of a different color. I've seen some beautiful blue ones at the grocery. A clear sleeve over a translucent core would be rather interesting. I'm also wondering if it would be possible to make a custom hotend/nozzle to make my own bi/tri-color petgs because there doesn't seem to be a good selection like there is of pla. Taking bought spools and running them through this setup to get a new spool is what I'm getting at.
Interesting about the filament shape 5:45... You know, you test adding a core to the filament 🤔 like glass fibers, or graphene, or another plastic to change the behaviour of the end product... 🎉
I'd gladly jump on this if Finland hadn't already solved the recycling issue lol. You pay extra in the form of a deposit for every plastic, glass and metal bottle/can that is returnable. You can return them to nearly any convenience store and get your money back. The amount of money is significant enough that making filament out of them would be somewhat financially detrimental. There is also no enviromental incentive for me personally to recycle the material, since my country already has a great infrastructure in place to do so.
So, this is just an ad then right?
Quite right
What is the hotend temperature while making filament.
LOVE the Chopped shirt! Was the 180% flow for the smaller filament a guess? And did you find a solution for if you ended up with filament that is too big? I am struggling with consistency and finding a solution that will work with a larger tolerance than the +/- .02 that you get with store bought filaments.
I'm thinking of making a filament machine of this type, but I run into the problem that there doesn't seem to be a 1.75mm extruder nozzle for sale that would be perfect to make
Just make your own by drilling out a brass nozzle to about 1.74mm, very simple to do.
Don't get a nozzle. Get a brass bolt, drill it with a 1.7mm drill bit and make the heated portion around 10mm. On the entrance drill the bolt with a larger bit to make a smooth chamfer. This will give you the best result.
@@KevinGroninga3D Thank you. I had been thinking about this possibility for a few days. I'm going to try that
@@Anonymous-qx5uk Thanks for the info. I'll try to do that
@@EderRSW My Recreator3D MK5 just uses the standard hotend from an Ender 3. I drilled the .4mm brass nozzle out to 1.7mm, then carefully wobbled the bit until the hole was just big enough to slide in a bit of commercially made filament (verify is 1.75mm). Then using some small countersink and smooth step bits, I funneled out the back of the nozzle and the aluminum heat block. This makes it easy to feed the thin narrow end of the PET ribbon into the back of the block and out of the nozzle so you can grab it with a pliers to get it started.
The prices are extremely expensive for something that can be put together with much less money. There are plans of different machines available all over the Internet.
There are many free and open source solutions for PET machines, why need to use paid one?
Everything has a cost and nothing is free. If it is, then you have to spend your time. For some of us, our time is far more valuable than the cost of a solution.
Nobody is forcing you to buy anything.
@@ahaveland The solution in the video was hugely time consuming too so that's not a great argument
@@oyuyuy That may be true, but it's not your time that's being consumed if others want to use it!
@@ahaveland So first you argue that time matters and now you argue that it doesn't? Hmm.
@@oyuyuy No I am not. It matters to some people and not to others. Is that so difficult to understand?
Been interested in filament recycling recently and this might end up being the kit I go with. I just have a few questions such as the essentials kit comes with ALL of the hardware and all i would need to do is print and assemble everything? and would PETG be good enough to print with for the machines?
I have build two projects similar to this one, Recreator3D and PETamentor, and you can definitely print the parts out of PETG. Just note that this recycled PET is quite labor and time consuming and the yield is quite small, per bottle. On the plus side, rPET is quite sturdy and suitable for funcional parts.
I don't accumulate enough PET bottles for this to be an option.
But I send all my waste PLA to a filament recycling company, where I can directly buy recycled PLA - Haven't bought new PLA in ages.
Where is that company located?
Are you going to do a review of the Carvera Air?
I'm quite interested since I missed the early bird original Carvera and it turns out the released one _was_ actually more expensive, so I have a bit of fomo now with the little brother which is even more affordable.
I'd love to see your maker perspective especially to balance out between the first timer "Wow! thats amazing I can do it at home!" and the actual machine shop worker "That doesnt chuck 3 tons of steel per week, so useless".
FWIW this time I made sure to get one of the super early birds 😁
About one and a half year ago, I've got my first 3D printer - Anet A8! (Seriously. It was a first place prize on RoboFinist 2022). I had A LOT of problems with this printer, and recently it stoped heating. Seems like either extruder MOSFET burned, or the ATMega got partially damaged. People say, that the only way to fix it, is to get a new motherboard, but I think, it's time for a new printer. Kinda want to try making a filament exturder out of my AnetA8
Probably still need a new board for it but I'd recommend something quick and cheap like the SKR mini E3 or even a second hand OEM Ender 3 board. An MKS Tinybee board could work too but people have had mixed results with that board. It doesn't even need to have the latest firmware either. A 3D printer can be repurposed as a pulstruder as long as it can run an extruder motor. From there, just attach that motor to a pulstruder instead and feed it gcode to just "extrude" filament. A rather boring job for something that still thinks it's a 3D printer lol
@@lajoyalobos2009 I wonder, if I can repurpose heated bed channel for it. Still feels kinda dangerous
I have remixed Joshua Taylor Recreator 3D into a Anet A8 version. You can find it in Printables. Feel free to check it out.
Is there a build plate that you would recommend for printing petg without the need for extras applied such as glue stick?
My feeling is that the prices of the equipment are fair for what they do, given that they'll be small-scale manufacturing for the kits. However, I seriously doubt there's any real economic value in the process.
Ignoring the cost of the labour involved in using this (which, if I'm being honest, is almost certainly a deal-breaker in and of itself) and in building this (which I'm willing to do because the building part would be fairly fun, I think), there's still the really long time needed to recoup costs. Getting the full combo will cost me 476$ CAD, shipped. I can buy PETG locally for around 22$ CAD. So I'd need to generate over 21.5 kg of PET before I broke even. But the math isn't done yet.
The internet tells me that a 2L pop bottle is around 40 to 50g of plastic, as of 2009. (It may be even less now, as there's been a *lot* of work put into reducing the input costs of things like pop bottles.) You didn't say this explicitly but the video suggests that the very tops and bottoms aren't usable. So if we assume that the bottle weighs 50g and 80% of that mass is usable, I'm getting 40g of filament per bottle. That means I need almost 540 2L bottles to make enough filament to break even. But... in Canada, I pay a 20 cent deposit when I buy that bottle, and if I don't return it to a recycling depot I'm out that money. 20 cents each on 540 bottles is 108$ in lost recycling fees... which is another 4kg of PET I need to recover that cost, Which is another 100 bottles. Which is another 20$ in lost recycling fees, so another kilo of PET I need, which is another 25 bottles and 5$ in recycling fees, and now I'm tired of doing this math so let's just say that's like 10 more bottles to get enough PET to cover all those fees. So 540 + 100 + 25 + 10 = 675 bottles.
I go through 1 to 2 2L pop bottles a week. Even at the high end of consumption, that works out to 337.5 weeks or about 6.5 *years* before I generate enough pop bottles to *recover my cost*.
And I honestly don't see most people managing it much faster, because even for folks who go through more PET than I do this is a *very* labour intensive process. I feel like it would be a minimum of 2 years to recover the costs. And you aren't even having a huge impact on the environment, because recycling PET at scale is something *we know how to do.*
Granted that I live in Alberta, which apparently is a world leader in this, and so there will be other jurisdictions that don't do nearly as good a job of dealing with waste PET. (83% of plastic bottles sold in Alberta get recycled, the internet tells me, compared with 60% in US states were there's a cost to the consumer and a measly 24% in US states where there's no bottle deposit) Someone living in such a place might well be able to make a measurable difference, at least on their own personal waste level. But realistically - PET is a materiel that can easily be dealt with in volume and at scale and the path to reducing plastic bottle waste is to picket your local government until they spend some money on recycling programs, not doing it yourself to make 3d printing material.
So this was really cool and a fun video and if the welder had existed in 2018 I might even have bought it (but now I don't *have* random ends of spools because I just let them run out in my X1C; even if I get the timing wrong the printer will sit there until I get home from work so I'm only losing time and a tiny amount of electricity). But there's just no use case here beyond "I want to be able to say I made this thing from a plastic bottle." Like any other home-recycling idea, the labour and equipment costs are just too high, and it will never be worth it. Recycling is a task that needs to be done at large volume, not in individual homes.
I feel like the 10c deposit shouldn't be the main factor in the machine paying for itself. Assuming your hobby time spent to process the plastic isn't worth much money to you, it'll slowly convert your free time into a cheap prototype material. It would take a lot of plastic bottles to get even a single kilogram out, but if online shopping is the fastest way to get filament in your area, it could even be the fastest way to get a very small amount of filament.
1st! Great video, greetings from Greece
Please do one with VHS tape, straight from cassette ;)
Go Igor
8:54 & 10:50 are important if you wanna use it instead of cell it
Subject is different but can you make a video for btt pad 7 with multiple instances?
Not really interested in PET bottle filament due to them being easily recyclable here. But I do like the filament joiner idea. However the joins didnt look that great, id really love a dedicated filament joiner that actually worked! I have so many leftover spools.
This has been around for a few years now, I have made my own machine using an Arduino, have not bothered with joining as I have a smart run out sensor..... I used a few parts from jrtd3d...... Anything less than a 1L bottle is just not worth it.....
Question around that mains wiring, if one was to hypothetically have a voron, are there any actual electricians who would even bother to check it out for you as a job? It is hard enough to get any tradie to do something regular properly, let alone something outside of the box in Australia.
ive seen something to this with in the last couple of years, using an old ender 3 board i had it still used some presliced gcode, and i see some similar resemblence to it, just a few differences, i did not like how the machine worked, and ended up tearing the machine part, luckily i only had a few bucks in it, that was just frame peices, printed parts, and a sacrafical mk8 heat block, alo i made a few caps with tire valves pumped them up, and using a drill, would spin the bottle as well as a heat gun to get a uniform thickness
it may have just been my setup, and some parts did break on me, but givven the nature of pete it is hard to process cuz of its issues with water vapor making it very brittle, though would make strong prints
yeah the recreator by JRT3D
i definetly like the ittiration and the steps further thats been taken with, it seen several things similar lately with automated joiners and winders really cool, and really is not too expensive compared to some other designs out there
but to help with getting a consistant thickness, after pressurizing attach to a drill and spin while using the heat gun should making things easier
While I don't doubt that it's a good machine, $200 to pulstrude PET seems quite a bit of a steep price to me. I built Function3D's pulstruder for probably less than a quarter of that and used far less filament to print the parts for it. That's just my two cents, YMMV. A cheap or unused 3D printer board (just needs to process very, very basic gcode), power supply, 1 stepper motor, hotend components and a simple screen and you're in business.
I can see some good use in the filament joiner though.
Still, you have to give credit to de designer for all the modeling and software/testing, plus quite a good work put into manuals. Considering the sourcing of the parts as well, I believe 200$ is a fair price.
Mostly interested in the splicer for regular filament
I'm curious if there is a way to insert a secondary material inside the PET tube that is formed from the bottle.
Granulation and screw remelting seems way better. At least it ignores bottle thickness and form limitations.
This filament is empty inside. Why not put there some core? Like CF or nylon
I'm thinking about trying it
where can i find the bottle stripper?
Nice, but tbh part with with removing the glue residue seems not very fun
it's not a problem.
I'm all for recycling, but this not only looks like a nightmare, but an expensive nightmare. Both for the kit, and the amount of time it will cost you.
Just don't buy it
This tech makes sense for one use case - you cannot afford filament. Poor college students maybe? Kids with too much free time? Third world countries that have lots of PET bottles literally littered everywhere but cannot get filament cheaply shipped to their country would benefit from this type of system.
Hi, can you give me stl. from pet cutter ? thanks
pet is one of the few plastics that are actually recycled, it's bit sad to see it scraped to make 3d prints that very probably won't be recycled
This rPET filament making process can be used in small scale as means of raising public awareness for the problems of plastic disposal and the importance of recycling.
@ It can be used to educate students, and change towards a more environmentally conscious society.
$1000 and 3 months later you’ll have a whole reel of filament!😅
Can it print miniatures?
You might want to scrub those clearly visible google drive URLs from your video. I'd guess they contain the designs he's trying to sell.
Nice way to turn 10c into 10$
sadly takes hours to process a 5l water bottle that yields around 20g filament
One bottle cost here 25cent... its called Pfand 🤣👍
Why not recreator machine?
Не дадите stl вазы, что в самом начале ролика?
Let's be honest : If this " shit " really cost 500$ in total, my 300$ 3d printer cost 3000$.
This is fantastic. I believe the hobby needs to move away from the RGB-fest of emulating overclocked gaming PC's and towards functional, sustainable open source tech that we can spearhead such that it becomes affordable to all. If this stuff got half the attention that making dime-a-dozen busts of marvel characters in silk chromatic PLA did then I would be very happy.
Or you know just make a Recreator from Recreator3d and skip the annoying squeaking, weird noises inconsistencies etc…
This process looks to have a very high energy and chemical usage making it worse environmentally than kerbside recycling.
For me this is not viable at all. How many PETG rolls can I buy for just the price of all of this? Too much trouble to have nothing in return except wasted time and energy. The idea is cool, but the actual solution does not fit the purpose.
At 5.17 squiky old technology
Lol !