Newbie with a Question : Material sources.

Hello everyone,

I am Makurian and I am new to this whole 3d Printer stuff, but find it very interesting.

My question is the following : Is there a way to recycle the type of plastics in a medium scale to produce reprap cable bundles ?

The question is relevant because I live in Africa and getting plastic cables shipped all the way from Europe don't cut it to me, neither is it easy to find the reprap graded material easily. But if I can convert local trash plastic into reprap usable wire then the 3D printer gain an almost unlimited amount of raw material.

I have tried to look up around the webs, but failed to find something relevant, so I came here to the source.

My personal project is to design and build a RepRap printable recycling unit so that people can recycle plastics on a small scale for their printers.

I understand that here there are certainly experts on the kind of material used by reprap, hence why I made the thread.

Opinions ? critic ? Ideas ? or am I bordeline insane

It's an active area of research. See [www.thingiverse.com] as one example.

bryanandaimee Wrote:
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> It's an active area of research. See
> [www.thingiverse.com] as one
> example.



><

Thanks good Sir, I would mail you a Beer for your RepRap to materialize it ... but we aren't in 2500 yet

Other projects aiming to recycle old material can be found in the Category 'Recycling' on the wiki: [reprap.org]

Also, the Granule Extruder is a toolhead aimed at melting and extruding plastic pellets. The wiki pages are [reprap.org] and [reprap.org] .

Generally there are two approaches to the problem:
A ) Melt scrap plastic into filament or pellets and extrude that.
B ) Extrude the scrap plastic directly.

Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 11/16/2011 09:33AM by SarahMiller.

... all the fuzz about diameter accuracies and embedded air in the filament ... why not mill all the plastic to dust and start to build powder-sintering 3D-printers?

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Viktor
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Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

VDX Wrote:
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> ... all the fuzz about diameter accuracies and
> embedded air in the filament ... why not mill
> all the plastic to dust and start to build
> powder-sintering 3D-printers?


I am a noob, which why I asked the question

I think I could make 2 heads for my printer : One for filament and another for powder ?

Feeding the powder can be a little tricky ? i fell like it would require some reinforcements of the cadre of the printer

... look at powderbed-printers - instead of printing glue with an ink-head, you can melt dots and areas with a hot spot, or print thin lines separating the inner areas with saltwater and melt the complete powder-surface (except the 'salted' lines) at once with a big IR-heater ... this is called 'inhibition sintering'.

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Viktor
--------
Aufruf zum Projekt "Müll-freie Meere" - [reprap.org] -- Deutsche Facebook-Gruppe - [www.facebook.com]

Call for the project "garbage-free seas" - [reprap.org]

Hello community!

There are always some projects going on with the devolopment of a granule extruder, beceasue of chaos properties of open source development, I will post this to notify you about the most recent (first quarter 2012) projects regarding granule extruders, including mine

I would like to notify you about my project, which is partially bases on research such as this forum topic and other simultanious projects:

My PROJECT PAGE
My FORUM TOPIC to give feedback after examining the project page obove

similar simultaniuos projects:
Marcus grinder/shredder+filament maker project
extruder printer head Project page
extruder printer head Topic page
Filabot project
you can also see my project page to see all the links and projects I've found on my research. It can save you time to follow my notes.

Greetings Ward

Ward Hupperets, please stop crossposting everywhere in the forums. A couple of posts saying the same thing is enough.

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Most of my technical comments should be correct, but is THIS one ?
Anyway, as a rule of thumb, always double check what people write.