Feeding the 3D printer – how open source solution helps save on costs

3D printers need 3D ‘ink’. Mostly, that’s plastic that can be melted by the print nozzles and be deposited to produce the part being printed. The plastic comes in the form of a plastic wire – a filament that is quite costly: $ 40 to 50 per kilogram.

John Robb’s Resilient Communities blog has a report on how a retired business owner turned inventor figured out a way to save big on that printer feedstock.

How a Retiree Invented a Way to Save Big $$ on 3D Printing

Hugh Lyman invented a device that melts low-cost plastic pellets and extrudes a filament capable of feeding 3D printers, lowering the cost to about one tenth. The invention is open source and is available from thingiverse.

That gives hope. One of the greatest problems with 3D printing seems to be the rather limited range of materials those printers can work with. With genius such as Hugh Lyman’s applied to that question, eventually the range of things that can be made by 3D printing will greatly increase … with new materials added to the feedstock library, ever more complicated ‘things’ can be made from scratch. And it’s not too far off in the future.

1 Comment Feeding the 3D printer – how open source solution helps save on costs

  1. Avatarodin

    Lyman’s technique is basically a smaller version of what is already used to make filament (plastic “wire” that the 3D printer uses). The off the shelf wire product is made from the same pellets and the large scale production of that wire is much less costly than producing it on a DIY (especially if with factor in time and training). The basic problem is lack of competition among large scale producers of filament. From what I’ve heard there is only one major supplier in the US that the different stores all buy it from.

    What we should hope for, though, is that recycling plants will in the future be able to produce filament for local use.

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