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This home-made filament dramatically improves the economics of 3D printing. For instance, producing 392 chess pieces in a particular color requires one kilogram
by 001sky 14y ago
This home-made filament dramatically improves the economics of 3D printing. For instance, producing 392 chess pieces in a particular color requires one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of plastic. Buy one spool of mass-produced filament, and that will cost you about $50. Buy a kilogram of pellets and make your own filament, and the cost goes down to $10. Buy 25 kilograms of pellets in bulk, and you can print the chess pieces for just $5.
-- Seems to meet the "10x better" criterion.
Nice work.
- Someone 14y agoMaybe. What is the price of 25 kg of filament in bulk? I know almost nothing about producing filament, but if I had to guess, I would say its price is high because of low demand. If demand goes up, competition will drive the price down.
- simcop2387 14y agoIt's partly low demand (relatively speaking) and partly because the machines to make it have historically been on the expensive side (i've heard something like half a million or so). Then there's the time that it takes to run a batch of filament and all the other normal business issues there. It'll definitely come down but it'll likely only approach the range that has been hit with lyman's machine. The pellets have high demand and extremely high quantity (injection moulding). That being said, even when commercial costs come down to this realm they'll still likely have more consistent and higher quality filaments (longer runs tend to even out issues in the plastic).
- kefka 14y agoI'm already thinking of ways to automate this machine to "print money". Run a fan at the end of the filament guide. Then, attach a mouse recovered wheel encoder to monitor amount of filament extruded. Then make a simple geared wheel that turns the rate equal to extrusion (with some given slack). You can even stagger it the similar way a yarn winder weaves on the coil, to allow even fill on the spool. After the circuit monitoring this process indicates the right amount of filament on spool, it kills the system and alerts operator to finish spool prep. I could probably make a tidy profit if I made 20 machines and undercut filament prices of everyone on the market now. And even charge a bit extra for customized filament color (mixing beadstock would be easy).
- simcop2387 14y agoWhat would likely help that even more is to do it in some larger spools (say 20kg spools) so that you can do larger runs and then chop it up later. There is a possible market here to do that, but I don't know what kind of margins you could expect; I've got no idea what the power the filament extruders use. I'll know when/if I finally get my filabot from the kickstarter, it's a very very similar design to lyman's but came a bit later. The main thing I'm after for it is that it'll come with a grinder to let me take things like plastic bottles and try to print with PET plastics and other strange materials.
- bnegreve 14y agoYep, you can get 9800 chess pieces for a total price of $49000. (392 per kg x 25kg x $5). Still a significant investment :)
- brianobush 14y agominus the 980 errors :)
- chongli 14y ago$5 per 392 pieces, not $5 each. So that's 9800 pieces for $125.
- bnegreve 14y agooops, you're right.
- simcop2387 14y agoYou should check your math there. They talk about the filament ending up $5/kg. So the cost is $5/kg * 25 kg = $125. 392 pieces/kg * 25 kg = 9800 pieces. So you end up with about 306 (9800/32 pieces) chess sets for $125. That's less than a dollar a set. I don't know what you'd need with that many sets but it really does change things.