No. 04
From a dead printer to a bottle machine
An old TEVO Tarantula becomes the frame, board and motors of a Recreator3D MK6 that turns drink bottles into filament. Where it stands, honestly.
We had a dead 3D printer. This month it got a job.
The machine
The Recreator3D MK6 “Fun Size”, by Joshua R. Taylor, is a small open design that turns a clear drink bottle into 3D-printer filament. You cut the bottle into one long ribbon. A small motor pulls the ribbon through a heated brass nozzle, which curls it into a round strand and winds it onto a spool. No shredder, no extruder, one heater.
It is the simplest way into plastic recycling we know, and the most watchable: a bottle visibly becomes a spool. Our own physics estimate is 5 to 9 m of filament from a 1.5 L bottle. We will measure it and publish the real number.
The MK6 needs a frame, a controller board, a screen and a couple of motors. A dead printer has all of those.
It wasn’t the printer we thought
For the first few days the plan said “the old Anet”. Then we took photos of the board and the frame, and it wasn’t an Anet at all. It is a TEVO Tarantula, with an MKS Gen L board and a 2004 LCD screen. Different board, different firmware route. The commissioning plan was rewritten around it: Marlin 2.x, flashed over USB.
Then the inventory, part by part:
- Power supply: a 12 V, 25 A unit with no fuse and no switch on the mains side. It gets fixed, tested and tagged before anything heats up.
- Drivers: A4988, fine for this.
- Hotend: a V6-style unit and an older MK8, plus a spare inductive probe.
- Motors: the printer’s own steppers. Still to be tested on the bench.
Nothing gets switched on for real until two checks pass: the power supply is tested and tagged, and the heater provably shuts off if the temperature reading goes wrong. A runaway heater on a machine made from a dead printer is exactly the kind of thing that would end this project early.
The printed parts
The MK6 has a lot of printed parts. Fifteen of the original files were broken and needed repairing before they would slice cleanly. The print pack is one project per colour, and the black parts go first: about 17 hours and half a kilo of PLA.
One small disaster on the way. Re-saving a sliced project in the slicer’s window quietly reset some settings: three walls became two, and the supports on one part disappeared. It got committed before anyone noticed. We restored the right file and now check the settings inside every project file, not just the preview. It is the boring kind of mistake that wastes a full day of printing, so it goes in the log.
One rule we’ll keep
The MK6 licence is non-commercial. We can build it, film it, teach with it and share our changes. We will never sell it, its parts, or kits of it. That is fine. Not everything has to be a product.
Where it stands, honestly
The plan on 7 October was: finish the MK6 first. Since then it has hardly moved. The parts are prepared, the donor is inventoried, but the small hardware isn’t bought, nothing is assembled, and no filament has been made.
What changed is today’s decision. We bought a ready-made desktop extruder and a small crusher for 3D-print waste, due mid-November, instead of building a larger extruder from salvaged parts. It is meant for our own 3D-print waste, which we will have plenty of. The MK6 keeps its job: bottles, and teaching. But it is no longer the only road to recycled filament, and it would be dishonest to say it is still at the front of the queue.
Next for the MK6: buy the hardware, fix the power supply, first heat-up with the safety checks, first pull from a clear bottle. We will post the first metre, wobbly or not.
Les plans sont gratuits — the plans are free.
End of entry No. 04, written .