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The 3D Un-Printer
An anonymous reader writes "3D printing is on its way toward becoming ubiquitous. Of course, if you have such a printer and want to print something, you need raw materials — the plastic filament that's fed into the machine. It's also likely that while you're learning the ropes, you'll print a bunch of terrible attempts at objects, and end up having to throw them out. Now, Wired is reporting on a device aiming to solve both of those problems. Tyler McNaney's 'Filabot' will break down failed projects as well as many other plastic items from traditional manufacturers, turning them into a filament you can then feed through a 3D printer. 'So far the plastics that work are HDPE, LDPE, ABS, NYLON. More to come on the different types that work.' McNaney sees it as a 'closed-loop recycling system on your desk.' The Filabot's Kickstarter campaign succeeded easily in 2012, and now he and his team are getting ready to launch."
For Mr. Fusion.
Why waste time with recycling when I can just convert matter to energy?
That one is so easy to find from bags that it may be worth using those with this instead of throwing them away when you can't use them.
Will need to do some hacking work so this can work with HP 3d printers.
Who needs an icicle when you can just Un-Print your knife?
Everything is better with chainsaws.
I can see this going very poorly for your average consumer very quickly.
You mean the subset of people who are capable of operating a 3D printer, but can't read numbers in a recycle label.
I was under the impression that extruders to create the feed filament were still pretty expensive.
Plastic pellet feed stock is cheap industrial commodity, a lot cheaper than the plastic spools that are ready to be fed in to your 3D printer.
Hell with feeding this with bits of old plastic. If you can just feed it a bag of pellets, and it's cheap to buy, we'd have solved one of the bigger issues with DIY 3D printing.
The Filabot has more marketing than it has engineering. The Lyman filament extruder has already surpassed the filabots noisy and slow output. Makible, makers of the soon to be $200 3D printer the Makibox (http://www.makibox.com), are releasing a 1.75mm extruder (dubbed the "ramen) that they've already demonstrated working in previous google plus hangouts. The filabot is overhyped and overplayed. They got huge funding via a kickstarter a while back and ever since then, produced a prototype machine that's on the level of the very first filament extruders the reprap project had to begin with.
Gary Hodgson has released the history of reprap development on his site: http://garyhodgson.com/reprap/reprap-developer-bookshelf/ - and if you look through the reprap ebook, you'll see people doing what the filabot is doing now....3 years ago.
This is a complete non-story that publications love to jump on, I just wish they would do their research first.
I have long wondered what it would take to recycle soda bottles, being they are all made with the same high quality plastic that withstands the pressures of carbonated water ( sometimes heated carbonated water ) without exploding.
Yes, it would be worth it to me to clean the bottle if I could feed the bottle into some sort of machine which would reform the plastic into a more usable form.
It would make a market for used soda bottles, and get them off the street and out of our landfills. Our congress would also have to set the framework for original bottling to make sure all bottlers used the same plastic formulation so the reformers could use it.
I can well see the day when darned nearly anything plastic, especially things like pipe and fittings, could be made to order on the spot. Plastic things no longer wanted could be offered as feedstock to make something else.
Can you see going to Home Depot for some half-inch irrigation pipe and be able to pay for it in either dollars or recyclable plastic... and having them set their machine to extrude what you wanted right on the spot?
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
It is becoming cheaper and cheaper. When the cost is low enough, more consumers will buy and it becomes profitable.
Once people put out designs to buy for stupid things that teenagers like, it will fly off shelves. Print out your own cell phone cases or designs you can stick on your text books.
Also, you have tinkerers who will think it is fun to play with at that price.
All it will take is one killer product and everyone will start wanting one.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Once people put out designs to buy for stupid things that teenagers like, it will fly off shelves. Print out your own cell phone cases or designs you can stick on your text books.
Already happened: Nokia To Release Lumia Case Design Files For 3D Printers
Full recycling into anything other than bottles is slightly more involved so makes most sense in bulk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_terephthalate#Processing_examples_for_recycled_polyester
A lot of this material has been recycled near where I live for what seems like twenty years. Initially that meant that the black recycled material was a lot cheaper than anything else since you could throw in a lot of PET and if there's a bit of green or brown stuff in there you can just hide it all with black. That meant lots of cheap recycled black plastic for industrial purposes or things like wheelie bins (wheeled plastic trash containers around four foot high). Improved sorting and drink manufacturers mostly standardising on the same transparent PET means that now the transparent flakes are just about as cheap and then whatever color is desired gets added later, although there's probably just enough impurities that you don't want to use it to make a transparent plastic.
Bottle blowing machinery using plastic granules to feed it circa 1990 isn't really all that far removed from that and pipes could certainly be extruded using PET or similar. Something like a large "Home Depot" probably does have the economy of scale to make the granules if their customers are bringing in the right sort of plastics. The tricky bit seems to be sorting, and if the customers are doing that themselves before they bring the plastic in that makes everything a lot easier and possibly viable. I know I'd be happier to pay a bit more for a 620mm length of pipe made on the spot than cut it down from one metre.
In the construction industry at this point the amount of material wasted is enormous since the cost of materials is much cheaper than wages. The earlier practices of joining offcuts or even finding one long enough to do a job are gone. Being able to extrude parts to correct sizes onsite would save a lot of waste. Of course you can't easily do that with materials like steel, but steel is already so easy to recycle that it has a high enough scrap value that little is wasted, and the energy cost of remelting is not paticularly high.
Awesome, now I can melt down this drawer full of plastic spoons and forks and print me some nice sporks.
I can see the retired guys in woodworking clubs starting to play with these things for months on end and producing designs we are not capable of imagining. Take a few accumulated centuries of mucking about with woodcarving and remove a lot of the materials and fabrication limits they keep banging up against and who knows what will come out of it. That 3D printing example from the 1990s of a rook chesspiece with windows and an internal spiral staircase is just a hint of what is possible.
It's not about being stupid, it's about being able to do stuff without an industrial base because your economy has been screwed over before it built one. Building a factory to make X can be bloody hard if you need Y and Z to do it and both are coming from the other side of the world instead of from down the road (9/10s of China's success in electronics production at this point).
So what if it can only produce cheap plastic crap? The 1970s showed us that you could do a lot with cheap plastic crap. For a start about 90% of decent plumbing can be done with cheap plastic crap.
Steel gutters are basically made to size, on site, now. They come in pulling a trailer that has the steel rolled up on a spindle. The workers measure the size they need, and the machine rolls out that length, bending it into the proper gutter shape as it goes. The only seams are on the corners. Not exactly making the steel on the spot, but they are making the gutters on site.