Hi there,
I have been googling a lot for good quality filament that is not overpriced, eventually I came up on a few links to make your own filament factory (filament extruder).
It does not look that hard, nor that easy. But my main question is if anybody has any experience in this? Who have tried it before or who is actually doing this a lot for his own filament.
I mean the idea of having 1KG of filament for around 1$/KG is very tempting to try.
I have seen some kits to build one for around 300$, but on instructables there is a complete guide on making on on your own for less then 200$. And if you have some of the parts already available you won’t even pay more then 100$.
To everybody who tried this, how was the filament quality? My guess is that setting something up like this needs a lot of calibration/fine tuning to end up with some nice quality filament.
Links: instructables.com/id/Build-y … ry-Filame/
filastruder.com/products/filastruder-kit
I suspect that making filament is like using filament (printing) - you have to watch it like a hawk. There’s a guy in town who sells filament very cheaply - his webpage is very eye-catching because he sells lots of colors and varieties, and the price can’t be beat. So I bought 6 rolls of various colors PLA from him and most of it is gathering dust on my shelf. The two main problems were consistent thickness, or rather the appallingly dismal lack thereof. From one meter to the next, thickness could vary from 1.5 to almost 2.0mm, too thick to fit through the feeder hose. The second problem was garbage in the mix. One of the colors I ordered was actually uncolored (natural), which was clear enough that you could see tiny black specks throughout. Tiny to my eyes, that is, NOT to my printer nozzle. Clog City! In the end, a reputable filament reseller confided in me that this amazing shop was actually one guy with two homemade extruders in his apartment, and due to huge demand he was severely overworking them. In reality, you need to monitor the process closely to keep consistent speed which equals consistent thickness, and even then not always. Apparently extruding is just like printing, agonizingly slow and very tempting to speed up. That said, if I had the technical knowhow or the money to pay someone who did, I’d love to fool around with extruding my own. I would just have a few boxes of Velleman filament standing by when it came time to do real work. 
Well, I saw a desk filament maker with actually really consistent size, an avg of around 0.05mm fault margin. This looks incredible of course, especially for the prices which was around 450$ I think, maybe even less.
Of course you have to make quite some KG’s of filament to actually profit from it, but just the idea to make your own filament is awesome 
Especially when you like to do and produce yourself as much as you can…
I won’t be doing this anytime soon, but maybe in the future… you never know i guess
Especially when you like to do and produce yourself as much as you can…