You gonna melt and make filament from old prints ?

Just bought some parts to finalise my Filament making line, this summer all my wasted supports and failed prints will become filament again, all filmed and posted online linked to the website.

And make myself new filament from new pellets too.

For example, PLA pellets virgin (best quality, remolten filamnet is lower quality in printing) is about 2 to 3 Dollars per KG, but filament made of it you buy at 15 to 30 dollars per KG, and the better the filament the bigger the price difference between pellets and filament version, for example if making your own PLA filament saves you 10 to 20 USD per KG, making your own nylon saves you 20 to 30 USD per Kg, and so on to PEKK, where you save some 200 to 300 USD per KG.

Another good source of filament material for (almost) free is water botles, caps are Poly Amide, and body is HTPS, also coca cola, pepsicola, etc, bottles.



But when making filament is best to stay with one brand for each batch, as the polymers used differ from producer to producer so do not mix the coca cola bottles or caps with pepsi for example.

And the neighbours are good source of supply, just ask them to wash them with soap and rinse well before they dry them do bring them to you (except from the water bottles, does not need washing) so I acept any bottle as long as I know what was the origin, and store them in separate batches nd melt them indipendently.

Than I heed to shred them to pellets (I use a large industrial paper shredder that I recuperated on Ebay), dry them well (80 Celsius for a week) either in a food drier if the quantity is about 3 Kg or less, or in a clothes drier (cheap one on Amazon) cabinet where i can dry like 30 Kg at the time, than make them filament immediatelly or in 24 hours they have sucked back enough humidity to need another week of drying.