Does anyone here have experience with this? I’m on the verge of buying the Artme3D extruder kit as it seems to be complete with extruder and spooler. Alternatives like FelFil Evo will sell you the spooler for the same price as the extruder which in my opinion is a scam for something that isn’t that complicated.
The next challenge is filament degradation. Ideally you add some virgin plastic pellets to recycled plastic chunks so that there is enough plasticizer still left in there. Could you just add the plasticizer yourself? It commonly is glycerol or PEG which are pretty common and easily attainable chemicals. Does anyone here have experience with mixing additives yourself?
Am assuming it’s for making filament out of pellets which can be purchased for significantly cheaper price. But the price of extruder alone makes this completely a pointless effort as you’d have to use more than 600kg of plastic to get event in terms of price difference.
Had the screw been bigger it could be used for recycling used plastic but at that point you’d need mill for plastic as well which adds to price.
How consistent does your feedstock have to be? If you’re using PLA and just want to not landfill your supports and brims and so forth, you can pulverize it in a blender from the discount store. You’ll wind up with all different granule sizes, though.
Edit: Actually, if you drill down into the description of the individual parts they do explicitly say it includes one high compression feed screw meant for reclaiming waste plastic. Obviously you still have to pulverize it somehow first. The other feed screw it comes with is for making filament out of pellets. So, both.
I don’t think buying all this equipment is better for the environment than just burying the scrap material in a landfill.
But it might be more fun.
Or more tedious 😀