Recycling program for ABS/PLA (Page 1 of 3)

I was thinking of this very thing the other day.  I have so many scrap pieces that I can't do anything with since I don't have a filastruder yet.  It would be awesome for us to have a community based filament source from scraps.

Hey just an update I am still working on my recycling program, if you are interested or want more information please contact me.

I am very intrigued. no matter how bad I want one, I don't have the space for a Filastruder. I print constantly and go through about a spool every 3 weeks. So if the quality is good and consistent, and shipping within a reasonable amount of time is possible on your end, I would jump at a few spools.
This is also great for people who want to try different colors, but don't have enough application for certain colors to justify spending the $30-$60.

I'm subscribing to this thread, so keep us posted.

That is understandable. But on that note, have you taken into account that some users (like myself) print in both ABS as well as PLA (maybe even nylon and so on), and may consolidate their scraps into one pile and ship that to you?

We have a good community here, but the organizational skills of newbies/inexperienced users/etc., may be more likely to mix in materials they have been experimenting with. Either way, I'm eagerly separating my scraps now, so let me know if you do decide to move forward.

My thoughts:

I'm just not sure you'll get enough folks on board at the current pricing to hit $5k, so one or both have to change. $5k is really high for something like this. If you don't hit 5k, then all your time thus far is for nothing.

I know your ABS supply has no minimum order quantity, so remove that from your minimum budget and let it scale with how many backers you get. Same deal with shipping. You don't need $1500 for shipping if only 20 people back the project.

$41 for 1kg? You can get 1kg of ABS for $25 shipped. I just don't see people backing at this price, but maybe I'm wrong.

You don't yet own a Filastruder, so people may question if this is even possible, if the filament will be terrible quality, etc. How you want to mitigate that risk is up to you. Based on your KS location, you're 30 miles from Ian Johnson, so I'd definitely recommend contacting him and asking if you can see his setup - he has a Filastruder (and many Filawinders). He may even let you use his setup, which would save you some money and let you lower your goal.

Video is better than the first one. It would be good to include video of Filastruders working (feel free to pull from my KS video or peoples YouTube videos) and/or quotes from people with Filastruders commenting on the quality (check the Filastruder testimonials page and Filastruder Facebook page for quotes)

$90 for melt filter nozzles? You only need two, one for each size. They're reusable/cleanable. I would also be sure to talk about the melt filter nozzles more, so people are reassured that the filament they get will be free of contaminants. I see you budgeted for two Filastruders, this is also a scalable cost - budget for one and if you raise more and want to purchase two, awesome. You don't need two if only 20 people back you.

$45 seems high for 5kg of granulation. That'd fit in a medium flat rate box, so $11 for postage, $4 for KS fees, that's $30 to run it through the granulator.

The thing about Kickstarter is that building momentum yields free publicity. I priced Filastruders during the KS campaign at not much more than they cost to produce - in fact, I make more net profit on 200 Filastruders now that I did for the entire campaign (of 775 Filastruders). It also helped a lot that I had a 3 month long development thread and 20 beta testers, so folks were able to hear about it and get put on a notification list for a good long while.

I launched at 7pm on a Monday, which was against most studies I found on the best time to launch on KS (have you researched this?), but I was just too excited to care. At the launch, I emailed all 50 waitisters - this is the bulk of the $10k I got in those first 5 hours. Lucky for me, KS put me in the "staff picks" section. I'm still not sure how this worked (and it doesn't matter now since they don't do staff picks anymore) but my KS rep said that every day, they open all the new projects and vote on which ones are the best. So - that initial momentum was huge, and launched me in to a $40k day the following day. So that's $50k raised in 31 hours.

On April 7th, I ran out of kits. I intentionally limited them, as I wanted to under promise, over deliver so that I would make a good name for myself. I ended up losing out on roughly $150k based on analytics, but it was worth it to me to establish that I make delivery dates a priority. Then on April 21st, I ran out of fully assembled units - limited these for the same reasons, but unfortunately OS Printing was about 2 months late delivering. Still, would have been worse if these were left unlimited.

You can't promise this: (or better stated, it is a really bad idea to promise this)

You talked about drill winding. This works fine, but people won't like it -  they'll imagine the spool is full of tangles. See if Ian will loan you a Filawinder. Plus, this lets you use the Filawinder video, which looks really cool.

There's still some typos:

You indent some paragraphs but not others.

I think that's it for now. Its a great idea and something no one else is doing right now, but I think some finishing touches would go a long way towards success.

You made the news.

http://3dprint.com/6156/3d-printer-recycling-program/

Does this project include very dense prints? Like 90% infill dense? Didn't see it clarified on the Kickstarter.

Have you used the granulator yet? If not, I'd recommend changing that to "should work". Under promise, over deliver.

I've been following your progress for a while now and my advice is delete this post until you've had  some time to think this through.  Your pretty early in the game to give up and you have a lot of hard work into this project.  Seems a shame to throw it all away so quickly.

No, no, no... Way too quick to pull the plug.

I have some ideas floating around. Give me some time to sketch it out.

Chemical analysis to figure grade and type I'm assuming - We did the bite test back in the day and that worked for a bit.

As for contaminates, you might have to brick the batch first and skim/filter that way before you regrind and refine - Not sure though. What kind of contaminates we talking about?

All valid. I wonder if you could just broad extrude it threw a large filter or multiple nozzles (think crazy spaghetti) to burn it off, then ground again and then finalized into the filiment form afterwards.

I wonder if that would just waste it's lifespan though.