Does any of you have any experience with this? I’m looking at the Felfil Evo pellet extruder which seems like an acceptable option. One thing I don’t understand. Why are the shredder and spooler so ungodly expensive?
I mean, can’t you just use an old blender to grind pieces down far enough for the pellet extruder? The finer the better no? Airborne microplastic may be a concern at some point.
Also the spooler. Is that more complicated than a stepper motor that runs at a certain RPM spinning the spool around? With perhaps a mechanism that slows down a bit after X rotations to compensate for the spool getting thicker. Nothing an Arduino can’t handle. Also don’t grip the spool that tightly so pull strength is more or less equal.
Both the spooler and shredder individually cost more than a pellet extruder does…
While I know I’m not to the point of investing in a full setup, I have started grinding down my waste so they don’t take up so much space. I currently have two paper shredders on hand, and one is functional. It will pull prints apart up to maybe 3/16" thick, but anything larger requires manually breaking down so it’s quite a tedious process. And even this setup is only enough to get the plastic broken down into ribbons, I’m nowhere near chopping into pellets yet. Based on an idea I’ve seen online, I would would to take the parts I have, and recombine them into something with heavier gearing to really tear into the larger pieces. If I could run everything through 2-3 times to cross-cut the resulting strips then maybe I can end up with fairly consistent sized pieces. It might even be worthwhile to build a second machine that runs much faster for the pieces after the first grinding, that might work better to chop up the smaller bits although there still wouldn’t be any control over the final pellet sizes.
Even with all the work I’ve put into this so far, I still don’t have enough waste of any one color to make even half a spool of filament. I figure I’ll just keep storing the grindings until I get enough on hand, then start looking into building an extruder/spooler. So far my only real cost in this was for the plastic tubs to store the waste materials in, so I’m not really out anything.