Homemade filament spools

The Filastruder works fine now, so I was thinking about how to get some cheap spools for all the future filament. There are some printed version, which would work if I'm the only user but if I want to sell a bit filament to my local 3D printing community I will need a cheap alternative.

I did not find a lot of offers which would suit my needs for a spool so I glued together two toilet paper roll to make the core diameter bigger and put some cardboard on the sides, drilled holes in the sides and voilà a nice filament spool basically no cost.

I'm gonna test its functionality tonight but it looks promising.

Filastruder working!

Seeing how much hassle I still have with my printer I´m positively surprised how well the Filastruder and Filawinder work together.

Everything comes together nicely and the documentation is good, but the "hobbyists charm" is not lost.

This is our configuration. The Filastruder is angled 45° in order for the plastic to exit in a nice curve. In the final configuration the machine will stand completely upright so that the hot and soft plastic can exit smoothly.

This is the laser meter. I find it the most genius solution of all. The laser project a line onto photocells. Depending on how high or low he shadow of the filament is it tells the winder to speed up or slow down, so that constant tension is applied.

The last step is spooling. On the left side of the blue box is a little servo that controls the arm in a way that distributes the filament evenly on the spool.

There are some minor details still to work on like finding a good equilibrium between temperature, speed and filament diameter, but I´m already printing with self produced filament. Ill report on that next time.

Recycling test

Since out Filastruder is doing so well I was looking into reusing my print scrap.

First I just put the parts in my kitchen blender. Everything bigger than 2-3mm did not get shredded

Then I melted down some pieces in the oven and got a niece sheet of plastic.

 After freezing the sheet for 15 min I put it in the blender again. This worked better, but nearly destroyed the blender. You can see the clear plastic pieces broken of from the blender it self.

Maybe with a glass blender, more time in the oven to get the sheet thinner, and more freezing this will work better, but a blender with a glass case is not cheap to come by.