Topic: Is home extruding worth it?
Although relatively new to this, I am starting to burn through filament fast enough to wonder if there is any real return on investment with a DIY filament extruder beyond being able to make custom colors in any size batch I want.
Since I am blessed with a decent fabrication shop, and lots of spare parts, I figure I could make a DIY extruder for roughly $100. Or I could spring for a filastruder for $300ish.
I haven't seemed to find any uber-cheap source of pellets. Lowest I've seen is ~$4/lb (~$9/kg) for ABS. Add in masterbatch colorant and waste from testing/samples/failures/waste and it looks like consumables would run $10-12/kg.
Looking around on Amazon, there are regularly ~$20 specials on brand name ABS 1KG spools.
So, it would take 10-15kg of filament just to break-even. (At my pace, that's about a year's worth.)
Assuming 10hrs of initial build time, and 1 hr per KG, after 2 years, I'd have only paid myself $100 for 25hrs of work -- less than minimum wage. (And that is assuming no maintence time or cost over the two years.)
Are their benefits of home extrusion that I'm missing here? Are their sources of lower cost pellets that would make this compelling? Or have filament sale prices taken the value out of home extrudors?
(NOTE: I'm a maker at heart, so finding a reason to build one would be cool, but not at sub-minimum wage.)
Also, has anybody successfully made one of these work as a group buy at a makerspace? The numbers look much better if costs are split between multiple makers and the machine would get more usage -- IF sharing costs wouldn't be painful to organize.