What it is
3D printers make waste: failed prints, support material, purge (the plastic pushed out when a printer changes colour) and skirts. It is clean, single-type plastic, and we make it every week. A crusher chops it into small granules; an extruder melts them and pushes out a new strand of filament, which is cooled, measured and wound onto a spool. Ours is 1.75 mm, the usual size.
What changed
We had designed a salvaged build of an open-source extruder, with an old printer as the parts donor. Its key metal parts went out of stock, with no restock date. On 15 October 2026 we bought a ready-made desktop extruder and crusher instead (the 3DPANY BLE), so we can start this year and spend our build days on the bottle machine and Le Nez. It ships in November.
That is a trade-off and we say so: a bought machine is less of a story than a built one. The salvaged design stays in the handbook for anyone who wants to build it.
How we’ll run it
- PLA first, then PETG — the two everyday 3D-printing plastics. One at a time, dried first.
- No bottle flakes: bottles stay with the bottle machine. HDPE and PP go to the sheet press.
- Off site, in the garage, attended and ventilated.
The honest part
Steady diameter is the hard problem. We expect the first batches to be poor, and we will publish them anyway: diameter spread, weight, print tests, and energy per kilo at the plug. Recycled filament is for prototypes, jigs and bins until the tests prove a batch is good enough for anything more.
Les plans sont gratuits — the plans are free.
