Joris sez, “I interviewed Marek Senický about his Filamaker today. The device is a grinder and filament extruder that recycles waste plastic and turns old unwanted 3D prints into new ones.
I think its amazing and will greatly reduce the cost of 3D printing. Effectively to zero if waste is used [Ed: that’s artistic license — I’m sure Joris is familiar with the second law of thermodynamics]. It will also make 3D printing much greener.”
I wrote about Filabot, a competitor of Filamaker, last January. Joris explains the difference: “Filamaker has a grinder and extruder. So it grinds up old 3D prints and turns them into filament. It can also grind up ABS waste products and turn those into filament. So you take any old ABS item and grind it and filament pops out.
The Filabot is only an extruder that takes pellets and turns them into filament.”
The Filamaker currently extrudes 1 meter per minute. The dimensional tolerance of the diameter of the filament being produced is within 0.05mm. The speed and the dimensional tolerance are very good and I hope that the production device will be able to equal or exceed them. Dimensional tolerance is especially important since too much deviation in the filament diameter can cause your extruder to become clogged and this is far far far from fun. Also important is the fact that the filament has no air bubbles.
Filamaker Recycle your old 3D prints and turn waste into things
(Thanks, Joris!)